Thursday, November 22, 2007

A thought, a question...

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What path do you choose for yourself?
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2 comments:

LBJ said...

"The Road goes ever on and on down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can, pursuing it with eager feet, until it joins some larger way where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.”
J.R.R. Tolkien quotes

I couldn't help but think of the Ayn Rand Essay "The Only Path to Tomorrow:

Like so many others, Ayn Rand has heavily influenced the paths that I have chosen in my life. And though the first step was taken with The Fountainhead, which I read first, it truly began with Atlas Shrugged.

I was still a teen when I read the worn edition my favorite teacher gave me. He didn't give it to me so that I could "find" myself. . even at that age I was a fierce individualist. . it was more so that I could find my voice.

The list of books we were given to read at the time was long. The over-indulgent characters of Hemingway. The morally vacuous characters of Fitzgerald and the all-out assault of Salinger. The portrayal of our ugly human nature by Orwell, Steinbeck, and Huxley. Now those were good books but for me they drew a picture of someone that I really didn't want to be.

Not so with Atlas Shrugged.

John Galt, Dagney Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco d’Anconia — these were characters like none that I had ever encountered in a novel.They were honest and honorable. They believed in principle instead of pragmatism. They were true to themselves whether it made them popular or not.

Atlas Shrugged opened up paths that I had never considered before. Jefferson, Madison, Washington — these were names that I equated with irrelevance, not irreverence. Wasn’t Thoreau just a crazy old hermit? Who on earth is Lysander Spooner? This stuff pertains to economics?

But the biggest question was when I read it, as when I re-read it -“Am I the only person who thinks like this?”

And it's nice to know I'm not.

November 22, 2007 at 1:44 PM
Carteach said...

Sometimes, on the board at school, I write: A=A

Not one person has ever asked what it means.

"It is what it is" has a very special meaning for some people.

November 22, 2007 at 1:51 PM

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