Status Updates From The Passion of Ayn Rand

>That evening,Ayn exhibited a lack of human empathy that was astonishing.As Nathaniel, who conducted the conversation—it had the aura of a trial, except that the accused had no defense attorney—was pointing out the young woman's psychological deficiencies, he occasionally made some especially compelling point, succinct and well-phrased.Each time, Ayn chuckled with appreciation—and clapped her hands in applause.

>For Ayn, the use of her mind, the solving of the most complex of problems, was an effortless, joyous activity, it was the sole unchanging and permanent source of happiness in her life. To think, to see, to understand, to know, seemed to her as simple and uncomplicated as drawing breath; and the conclusions she reached seemed as clear and evident as the need to draw those breaths.

>He did not see the world as the bleak, irrational place that Ayn now considered it to be, and he searched desperately for reasons to give her hope, reasons to make her feel she was not living in the last days of the Roman Empire, reasons to convince her that there was more in the world around her than blank and corrupt mindlessness.

>there was no one to object to the attacks, no one to oppose them, no one with a public name, a public reputation, a public voice, to speak for her in that world which was vilifying her, to defend her, to fight for her, to name the nature and the stature of her accomplishment.

I need to write on this.

So insightful. I think that she's exactly right as to Rand's motivations here.

>We began to see each other frequently, and our relationship continued when our education took us to Los Angeles, as we struggled together to find a consistent view of a complex world, to find the answers to questions to which The Fountainhead had given us a key, but had not yet opened the door.

> "Dagny is myself, with any possible flaws eliminated," Ayn once said. "She is myself without my tiredness, without my chronic slightly anti-material feeling, without that which I consider the ivory tower element in me, or the theoretician versus the man of action. . . . Dagny is myself without a moment of exhaustion."

#keep

>The errors that set Dagny and Rearden in conflict with Galt and Francisco are what Ayn defined as errors of knowledge, not breaches of morality.

>"and all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone's senseless joke." Those years would come to an end for Dagny, through the living reality of John Galt. But they were not to end for Ayn.

>"A man wears a moustache or beard," she would say, "because he wants to hide behind it; there's something he wants to conceal, not just a physical defect, but a spiritual defect; I would never trust such a man."

Galt's Gulch exists, as a real place! The book calls it Urey, but there is no such town. However, there is an Ouray, CO, which seems to meet the description.

Reading about her defending "selfishness" on the page before, and here: "Roark's most important line, the line that named the theme of the book and the total of its meaning—the line 'I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others'—had been cut," I feel that I really do need to write an extended defense and explanation of her ideas. I've never seen it done, and it's desperately needed.

>She would spend hours and days on a single paragraph, struggling to capture exactly the emotional quality she intended. She went over each page of her work as if with a powerful microscope, never abandoning a word or a sentence at the approximate working far into many nights until she was fully satisfied.

"I devised certain events very slowly, by conscious calculation: what would be the key points of Roark's career, how he would start, what would be the early difficulties, how he would become famous."

/ If one were to meet Dominique in life, one would be appalled by her marriages and by her treatment of the man she adores; one would find it impossible to accept her motivation.

/ Roark, Keating, Wynand, and Toohey, the major male protagonists, are symbols; they represent four distinct psychologies and ways of dealing with good and evil; but they may also be taken as realistically possible individuals engaged in realistically possible courses of action. Only Dominique stands solely as a symbol—the symbol of idealism frozen by contempt. /

/ Ayn would ask for too great a "willing suspension of disbelief." By forming Dominique from herself "in a bad mood" and from an unrealistic vision of Frank, Ayn was dealing with a level of abstraction different from the level that was the source of her other characters. /

/ And she was to spend years trying to destroy herself and her own vision of life, that sense of what the world ought to be that was the cause of her torture at what is; she was to do it by leaving Roark and marrying two men she despised: first Peter Keating, then Gail Wynand. She was to be one of the most intriguing and complex of Ayn's characters, but ultimately she lacked the reality of the other characters. /

> The twin sources of Dominique's characterization may well be the reason why, even in the view of many readers who greatly admire Ayn's work, she was to be the most unsatisfactory figure in the novel. Dominique, who loves Roark, was to spend years attempting to destroy his career; it could have been no more intense and carefully structured a vendetta had she hated him. /

>Evil can destroy, it cannot build, it cannot create.

LoL how Tolkienesque!

/ "What if she believed that the "journalistic" facts around her were metaphysical—necessary and unalterable by the nature of reality?

/ She projected what she herself felt in moments of disgust or depression, during the worst of her indignation against injustice, her contempt for depravity, her passionate rebellion against the rule of mediocrity—and asked herself: "What if I really believed that that is all there is in life, that values and heroes have no chance in the world? /

>Ayn arrived at the essence of the inner conflict that would set Dominique in opposition to Roark, by introspection. "Dominique," she later remarked, is myself in a bad mood." /

It doesn't surprise me that Rand had much trouble getting published, that few understood her work, or that she was essentially blacklisted for being anti-Communist; it does surprise me thatshe was naive enough to be surprised. But it does interest me that even the outlets that bought her work seriously underestimated it, with Macmillan destroying the plates of We the Living after one edition.

You know, it's really gross that her heroes are so family-less, that family seems to count so little to her, when without the support and assistance of numerous family members, she would have never made it out of Russia.

"My favorite American movies were in the Milton Sills tradition—action, enormous benevolent freedom; they were not philosophical, but that's what I liked, it was if Atlantis had already arrived, the ideal was right here on earth, and one did not have to be philosophical, certainly not political, all those problems were already solved, and it was the perfect free existence for purposeful men."