My own history with Ayn Rand (as shared on Facebook)

[dogknob]

When I was in my teens, I read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. I thought it was pretty cool. I even entered an essay contest sponsored by Rand's foundation, which got me booted out of AP English class for "wasting my time and energy on a book that supports genocide."

Individualistic blood boiling, I started reading Atlas Shrugged in college. I can't remember how far I got before I started getting queasy. I never finished it.

Then, thanks to some delightful and memorable incidents, I noticed that puberty was definitely over. I never felt the impulse to pick up another Ayn Rand book.

I guess I just grew up.

"Growing up it all seems so one-sided. Opinions all provided. The future pre-decided. Detached and subdivided in the mass-production zone. Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone." -- "Subdivisions" by Neil Peart (who also outgrew Ayn Rand)

[Xipe Totec]

1. Booted out of AP? That's extreme

They're usually hard pressed to get anybody to expend extra effort writing, never mind the subject.

I hope you weren't discouraged from writing by that.

[dogknob]

2. This was in the late 80s

The teacher may very well have been a Holocaust survivor.

Aside from taking care to (usually) not come across like a doofus in my correspondence, I really haven't done a whole lot of writing until I got into those computer thingies around 2000.

I recently submitted some fiction to the mods of a gaming forum who are planning a zine. They loved it and it was fun to write, so we'll see...

[Warpy]

3. I read my way through Rand, all of it, at about 16

I could almost buy "The Fountainhead" although the characters were pretty laughable. I got my whole sense of humor back pretty quickly in the ponderous and preposterous "Atlas Shrugged," ten page polemics substituting for normal conversation between both lovers and enemies. I kept trying to envision a whiny toddler clinging to Taggart's pencil skirt and wanting its dinner right in the middle of one of those screeds. Other shots of everyday reality kept intruding itself into that idiotic plot. Railroads and steel new technologies? Jesus.

The rest of them came as a yawn and anticlimax, but those were the years when my eyes were still good enough for me to read everything an author had written so I could say I'd done it.

It also dawned on me that her idiotic philosophy suffered from the same problem as Marx's prescription for approaching Utopia, both relied on the perfection of the human species to work.

I wish I had met her only so I could have told her that. And run.