Wake up, go to work, come home, go to bed.
To ride the trainer or not to ride the trainer?
You know what's crazy about it too? I like it... It's like school all over again, but sans any thought. Just speed and effectiveness. That's all it is. It provides a nice contrast to my normally perfectionist mindset. Here, there is not perfection, there is only right and wrong. 50/50. You did it correctly or you didn't. It's like math, but less complicated, and for the first time in my life, I like it--only because i'm so burnt out on thinking so hard. School's insane, you know?
Finished Anthem in one day. Great book, I love pulling quotes out of this one. I'm looking into why she changed the name of the book from EGO to ANTHEM...
Anthem: noun -
1. a song--as a praise, devotion, or patriotism.
2. a piece of sacred vocal music, with words taken from the Scriptures.
verb -
4. to celebrate with or in an anthem.
2 comments:
Hey ho,
Yes, but in Greek, it means "response" for a particular kind of song by two choruses. However, I think Rand meant it as a "response" because her "mission" in writing was to salute the ideal in man. She felt that the response of a woman in looking up at a man (done nicely in the last chapter of Fountainhead) was part of her desire for the ideal.
Anthem was Rand's song to the ideal man, or the man of creative intellect who could "light the world."
I did not know you had read Atlas Shrugged. I think Rand's sense of life shows up in two scenes in that work. One where Dagny is flying and the ball of the earth falls behind her and when she wakes up in Galt's arms and says without thinking, "none of it meant anything, did it?" or thus paraphrased, thus dismissing her struggle as worth what she glimpsed that she had achieved.
Despite critics of Rand and some of her attempts that fell short, I applaud her sense of life, which I have carried with me for years. I tell people that the goal of humans is not to be better animals but to strive to be human in the sense of entities completely conscious and attempting to exercise both self-control and free will. It does not matter if we are killed, as long as we try to die on our feet. That is the essence of human to consciously try to evolve into something we can see even if the flesh and animal realm ultimately takes us.
The heroic is not so much that one is a winner but that one refuses to quit or one shuns trying. Even if most of the people I know think I am a failure, as long as I am trying to achieve my breadth of spirit, there is no failure.
But we have Shrugged. Sky and I have deliberately shunned financial success in order to promote our values of worthwhile work that effects the attempt to get humanity out of itself. Sky refuses to do work building better cell phones or gizmos, and instead works only in the sciences. I have refused to compromise my writing and art to the depths of commercialism to pander to the "plaster baby" crowd and have been an accountant to avoid a career drawing raccoons. I try to draw people, but I do some work for projects I consider to be not worthwhile only to exercise some idea of my own or practice my talent.
It is possible to live by ideals, but very hard. The worst is just letting others live the way that they want to live and to not tell them how to live better. I learned long, long ago that the only thing I could do was to set an example. Almost all his life Sky has been kicked out to sweep the roads until they need someone to save the spaceship from falling apart. He would dearly love to let the ship crash, but he hates sweeping roads to the point where offered any work, he will take it if he can.
Now that you are a man, I hope that you keep on your path, desiring to be a man of worth. To yourself, for no other man can determine that for you. Although I don't give a damn what others think of me, I do desire the company of peers and their recognition of my life's efforts. Sky doesn't even want that, or so he says, but I think he would love for someone to look at his work and understand it.
Well, I'm rattling on again. Rebecca asked me to give you a list of more books to read. I have a list of books with a sense of life, but not many that have the anthem quality of Rand's work. I do recommend "The Early Ayn Rand" but not her biographies. Also be aware that Objectivists tend to be full of themselves without having reason. I have often felt in meetings of such people that I wanted to sweep them all away with one gesture. Most of them envy Galt and aspire but despair of being him.
But are we not all better than Galt, for we are real. In each breath, we are more than Galt. But to deny that and wander around crying about it is just foolish.
Well, to work!
Go work, and work well.
aunt rachel
haha, it's funny that my mom said I'd read Atlas. I got about half way through it this summer, and starting losing it, because I just had so much going on. I was thinking about taking it to Europe, 'cause I'll have so much free time between training and eating lots of chocolate, and we'll be traveling a lot. So, I haven't really read Atlas, and even the little that I did, I was so out of tune with my analytical lenses--as it was over the summer and I was fried--that i really got nothing from it. I must try again soon. But I loved anthem. Great! i even had Ashley read it, just because i thought it would better summarize my personality than I had ever been able to.
Post a Comment