NP?: Bush/Saddam/Pynchon

[MalignD at aol.com]

Speaking of Thomas Pynchon, Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush in his 
article, Romanticism in Everyday Life, Robert James Bidinotto noted the 
following:

"I believe," Ayn Rand wrote in her Journals, "…that the worst curse on 
mankind is the ability to consider ideals as something quite abstract and 
detached from one's everyday life." (Journals of Ayn Rand [JAR] 66)

Of all the things that made Ayn Rand's ethical viewpoint so distinctive, it 
was her passionate devotion to this view. She made it the leitmotif of her 
literary heroines, giving to Kira Argounova of We the Living "her hunger for 
practical beauty, for dreams and reality united" (JAR 60) -- and sharing that 
same hunger with Dagny Taggart of Atlas Shrugged, who "never found beauty in 
longing for the impossible, and never found the possible to be beyond her 
reach."

This spirit, which regarded the ideal as a possible dream, is so at odds with 
the zeitgeist of the past two thousand years that it is hard for people to 
comprehend, let alone internalize. At least since Plato, the concept of the 
"ideal" has been defined as the antithesis to the "real." As a result, 
millions of people experience life as tragically sundered, torn between the 
loud demands of body and the quiet yearnings of soul -- between the 
meaningless clamor of mundane existence, and the faint, mocking call of a 
state of perfection ever beyond reach.

So ingrained is this outlook that even many who find Rand's unique moral 
vision compelling and inspirational nonetheless find it difficult to absorb 
and assimilate into their own lives. And often they wonder: How did this 
woman manage to do it?

How did she manage to develop and sustain her idealism in a world so 
inhospitable to such a vision? What gave her personality and her writing its 
special power, passion, and inspirational quality? Did she leave any clues, 
in her person and her works, to help us understand how to infuse our own 
lives with a similar sense of romance, passion, and meaning?

I touched on some of these issues in my talk, "What Objectivists Must Learn 
from Religion." But based on subsequent audience questions and comments, I 
believe there is more to say and to clarify. These remarks also will expand 
upon certain ideas from my talk, "The Value-Seeking Personality." That 
presentation focused on the moral and characterological aspects of becoming a 
value-seeker. This talk will stress the motivational and methodological 
dimensions: how to develop a passion for value-seeking, and how to sustain 
that passion in everyday life.