On Ayn Rand Day (which was on Monday, apparently) let's remember what to take seriously.
In a letter to a fan, she said of her novel Atlas Shrugged:
You ask me about the meaning of the dialogue on page 702 of ATLAS SHRUGGED:
'We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?' she whispered.'No, we never had to.' ...
Let me begin by saying that this is perhaps the most important point in the whole book, because it is the condensed emotional summation, the keynote or leitmotif, of the view of life presented in Atlas Shrugged. ...
What Dagny expresses here is the conviction that joy, exaltation, beauty, greatness, heroism, all the supreme, uplifting values of man's existence on earth, are the meaning of life—not the pain or ugliness he may encounter—that one must live for the sake of such exalted moments as one may be able to achieve or experience, not for the sake of suffering—that happiness matters, but suffering does not—that no matter how much pain one may have to endure, it is never to be taken seriously, that is: never to be taken as the essence and meaning of life—that the essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain.
1 comment:
Only a small minority of humanity are capable of ever understanding and appreciating the liberation of that statement. Even those that do, an even smaller minority will actualise it in their own lives. I think that can only happen after you have gone through a period of taking them seriously in your youth, and you have the willpower to go into battle with them anyway - eventually finding yourself winning, and your enemies weaker than they seemed. Then you reach a point where you don’t even care who wins, because you’ve thrown away the scoreboard. Not out of nihilism, but you appreciate the scoreboard doesn’t measure what you value. I think you need to reach middle age to get to this stage, as Ayn Rand was when she wrote this.
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