or maybe it was this week. who knows? i'm shocked that i care, even.
i'd read my share of nietzsche in college -- actually became quite a fan for a while -- before i got to rand. a friend and i were doing a "book club via email" in which we'd pick a title, read a chapter, then email each other impressions ... her choice was "the fountainhead," and i forced myself to read it.
to paraphrase someone else whose name i can't be bothered to google, "the fountainhead" isn't writing, it's typing.
my first thought was that it was just warmed-over nietzsche, with a bit of marxism thrown in. and imagine my surprise, lo these many years later, when i see that whittaker chambers agrees with me.
The full clinical diagnosis can be read in the pages of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Here I must break in with an aside. Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche's "last men," both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria.
yes. "or, to say the least, intransigent." (from the simpsons)
but i bring all this up not to prove my intellectual superiority (cough) but to point out that as i've gotten older, people's artistic tastes don't mean much to me. but they did when 10 years ago, when i fell kind of head over heels for a friend of mine in chicago ...
what almost stopped it wasn't that she smoked (though that did count for something), and it wasn't that she was a different race than me (though that did give me pause at how sparsely attended the wedding would have been on my side of the church). what almost stopped it was the fact that she said "atlas shrugged" was one of the best books she'd ever read.
man, that was shocking. stunning. disappointingly crushing. i did not know what to do. how could ... she ... like ... her? it was dreck, the worst kind of writing i'd come across in my life, the biggest bunch of phony bullshit pseudo-philosophy meant to appeal to pimpled teenagers and disaffected libertarians. and she thought it was brilliance.
nowadays, i don't think such a thing would have stopped me. but at the time ... damn.
