The Passion of Ayn Rand
Barbara BrandenThe Passion of Ayn Rand Gönderileri
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As one observes the bright sparks of thought that emanated from one mind and one ferocious will continuing to send out their lengthening rays, perhaps one can also see a small, passionately stalwart figure marching steadfastly forward into history.
Sayfa 422
“As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy,” she told the rows of gray-uniformed cadets and West Point officials and professors who overflowed the auditorium. “Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.”
Sayfa 378 - The speech at West Point, March of 1974
"They’re nothing!" Ayn told her friends with disgust. As always, she spoke only of her anger, her disapproval, her moral judgments—but not of her pain and hurt. The pain and hurt were bitter. Once more she had dared to hope for a value from the world, for something that was hers in the sea of irrationality in which she felt herself drowning. Once more her hope had turned to anguish and disillusionment. She was tired, desperately weary; the years were passing and her youth and strength were gone. What more would she have to endure?
Sayfa 377
“One day—it was both pathetic and annoying—Nora went to the market to buy toothpaste. When she came back, she was terribly upset and indignant. ‘I asked one of the staff for toothpaste,’ she said, ‘and all he would do was show me to a big rack filled with different kinds of toothpaste. He wouldn’t tell me which one to buy! Why wouldn’t he tell me?’ The multitude of choices available in this strange new country frightened her; she couldn’t handle it. And she was as- tounded when Ayn explained that you didn’t really have to count your change at the checkout counter; she couldn’t believe that the staff wouldn’t try to cheat her.” On another occasion—no longer convinced that she and Victor would remain permanently in America—Nora said, “What would I do if I stayed here? In Leningrad, I spend most of my time hunting down the food and other things I want, and waiting in lines. But here, if I go to the grocery store, everything is right there, half the time you don’t even need to cook it! I’d have nothing to do!” The impression among the friends of Ayn who heard this comment was that Nora was proud of her ability to maneuver for the things she wanted, proud of her ability to be devious and conniving. In America, where life was easier, there seemed no outlet for that ability.
Sayfa 376
When the first Random House advertisements for Atlas began to appear, as
part of one of the most major and aggressive advertising-promotion campaigns in the firm’s history—Ayn felt that they were essentially meaningless, and had her first quarrel with Bennett. But she was pleased when he ran an advertisement that she and Nathaniel had worked out together; it consisted of a dramatic portrait of Frank, with the caption ‘“‘This is John Galt—who said he would stop the motor of the world—and did. Meet him in Atlas Shrugged.”
October 10,1957
... One of them, concerned about how he would communicate her philosophy to book sellers, asked her jokingly: “Miss Rand—could you give the essence of your philosophy while standing on one foot?” She did. She said: “Metaphysics—objective reality; Epistemology—treason; Ethics—self-interest; Politics—capitalism.”
Sayfa 294
Her affair with Nathaniel had passed through its traumatic, tortured beginnings, and one began to see the emergence of a provocative, sexual woman. There was a new glow about her like a young woman in love; her stern features took on a softness and a femininity, as if cold marble had been warmed by an inner fire. Timidly, by slow, careful steps, Ayn was again attempting to live in the present, and was finding, in her work and in her romantic attachment—perhaps to her astonishment—a fulfillment the present had never before afforded her.
Sayfa 281
In retrospect, it appears that the rejection of her story in itself only partially accounts for the intensity and injustice of Ayn’s anger that night. More relevant is the fact that it was I, whom she had chosen, along with Nathaniel, as her closest friend, whom she had likened to her heroines, whom she had praised as an example and exemplar of her philosophy, was now invading the safe haven of her world not merely with alien values, but, still worse, with a repudiation of her work. And perhaps it was, as well, the explosion of all the frustrations of her affair with Nathaniel, all the unrecognized pain and guilt it was causing her, all that I stood for in her mind as the wife her lover steadfastly refused to leave. And no one heard her silent cry that life was intended for happiness and fulfillment—and why was that joy denied to her? It was in this tortured, explosive fusion of overheated emotions, of anguish and rage and frustrated longings and bitterness—and of love and sexual passion and ecstatic fulfillment—that Ayn at last completed the writing of John Galt’s speech.
Sayfa 279
The sexual affair between Ayn and Nathaniel had begun early in 1955. Years later, Nathaniel would acknowledge that their romance was not truly lived in reality. Rather, it was theater—no, not theater, it was a scene from a novel by Ayn Rand, full of sexual dominance and surrender and the uncontrollable pas- sion of two noble souls. Ayn, so desperate to live in the real world, not merely in her novels and in a future that never came—could not, after all, be content with reality. Once more, she was struggling to turn base metals—the painful, unsatis- factory fact of a woman having an adulterous affair with the too young husband of her closest friend—into the gold of a great and exalted romance. She succeeded in her fiction. She did not succeed in her life.
Sayfa 272
As I look back on the beginnings, I think of a question I have asked myself many times in the years since. How did Ayn, who had lived in sophisticated cities all her life and mingled with worldly, sophisticated people, not know that the course on which she was embarking could lead only to tragedy? Surely, by the age of fifty, one has seen enough of life and its complexities to have some intimation of what was to follow. Surely, she had lived long enough to know that she was presiding at the death of two marriages and at the corruption of four lives in an ugly tangle of deceit and emotional savaging and pain. But Ayn was a strikingly unsophisticated woman. She had had little personal experience of the world, except as it related to her career; with the exception of Frank, she had had no personal experience in intimate relationships with men. She had fought valiant battles, she had endured revolution and dictatorship and the death of her family and loneliness and joy and defeat and triumph—yet she had lived an oddly sheltered life, locked within the confines of her special view of reality. To Ayn, other people were not fully real; they were moving and breathing abstrac- tions, they were, for good or for ill, the embodiments of moral and psychological principles. They were not formed of flesh and blood and bone and sinew; they were formed of the ideas that moved them. It was how she saw herself; it was how she saw everyone else.
Sayfa 263