Re: ROTK Complete Recording, coming soon!


<jszostaksr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1189818493.753941.24310@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sep 14, 4:10 pm, Calvin <cri...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 14, 3:58 pm, Jaquandor <jaquan...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I also see very little evidence that her book commands any
real academic interest, whether from literary scholars or
philosophers. Certainly very, very few people I've ever known
would put the book anywhere near a mention of "War and
Peace" (which I have not read, btw), unless they were on
board with Rand's message. I've never met any non-conservative
or non-Objectivist people who thought Rand was any kind of
good author, which doesn't in my view support any notion that
her work rises above its polemical status into the realms of
great literature.

I don't claim that the book is 'great literature'. I claim it is
a great book, on its own terms. There should be no strict
rule that a book has to be like other books, in my opinion.

I bring up Tolstoy because both he and Rand were Russian
writers who wrote enormous books crammed with their
philosophies of life. And they were opposite philosophies:
collectivism in the best sense of 'mother Russia' that
Tolstoy had to offer; and individualism inspired by Rand's
revolt and flight from the Russian revolution of 1917.

Tolstoy's book was a 'great novel', a slice of life in a time
of continent-shaking conflict. If someone was denouncing
War and Peace I would start listing its great scenes. But
Rand's book doesn't pretend to be that kind of book. It's
more of the Brave New World or 1984 type of thing, a big
'what if' story, as told in a strangely envisioned future
relative to its time of publication.

I do like Rand's best writing, though I hear it denounced
all the time. She wrote some corny stuff: "I swear by my
my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of
another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." No,
nobody would say that in a real life situation, yet that was
the oath of the good guys in Atlas Shrugged. But she
also wrote this:

"It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke
of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence
and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every
human act and thought that has ascent as its motive. It was a
sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open.
It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept
space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort.
Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the
music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the
discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had
had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance."

Reading that is what made me know I was going to read
the whole book, the first time. That whole little mystery about
the Halley 5th Concerto, when everyone knew he only wrote
four, instantly got my attention. The book was full of touches
like that, and whether the Rand prose was always perfect
or not, she had a great feel for the dramatic, in scene after
scene.

I never cared very much for Ayn Rand's 'Objectivism'
philosophy...which to me smacked of being more an existensional view
of life.

I was just this week re-reading Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' and hit
upon the section called 'Passage to India'. This is more to my liking
than Rand's cold view of things. Here's a very small section which
'Passage to India' -

-------
Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, thou actual Me,
And lo! thou gently masterest the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full, the vastnesses of Space.

Greater than stars or suns,
Bounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth!
-------

To me...this is a Mystic's view of 'Objectivism'...which is far more a
cry from the indivual's point of view than anything Rand ever wrote.

Jon E. Szostak, Sr.


I love Whitman....See Vaughn Williams Sea Symphony last movement.



.

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