| | On nerdishness and adulthood... let me speak in stutters and protest!
When I was a nerd, it was because I loved books. It was because I could see connections between things that others did not, connections which exploded the conception of the universe that others took for granted. I loved books because they showed a world of brilliant color, a world which I was convinced could exist in essentials and I am now convinced could exist in essentials and fact.
I loved books because they showed me that life was not merely the life one was given, one was told, and one was to follow in the footsteps of.
I did not at the time conflict this with adulthood, and I carried on in every rational competence expecting that achievement would be natural and continual with success in a later world. It took years of a chiding accumulation of evidence to conclude the opposite; that passion, intelligence, eloquence, a demand to live was something to which managers, administrators, renters, parents, and all the other gatekeepers of adulthood reacted with primal rage and hatred. I could never come to terms with it until I read Leo Struass, who struck a nail of instant clarity with his theories of the philosopher and the city: that those who question the values of their society are of no use to it or those whose identity lies within it. Despite their competence. In fact, because of it. And this applies not only to sociopolitical entities but to adulthood, manhood, and all other social statuses by which the world lives.
Adulthood is a horrific package deal of economic independence and the state of having been spiritually broken, by a society which requires the second as the price of the first... and here, in America, according to a Protestant Ethic of material success in the service spiritual servility which, contra Rand, is in my opinion the real essence of an America to which I refuse any love or loyalty.
Fortunate, fortunate, are the few who truly manage to own their own lives. One reason there are so few libertarians is that most people swallow their dreams and passion as only the 'natural', 'inevitable' price for getting somewhere in this world, and the creatures who accept to be so ridden do not desire liberty much longer, or at most desire only its letter (see: Charles Murray). And I have seen innumerable spirits, in fact, everyone of brilliance I knew when I was young, destroyed by doors slammed precisely because they refused to conform to the passionlessness of pathetic inferiors in suits, slugs who by rights should be groveling at their feet.
Some of them collapsed in despair. Others 'checked their premises'- and I say this honorable phrase with a sickened wretch- and amended their dreams, put on society's clothes, and became, oh, how so successful! I remember one of the few true friends in my life, a brilliant student of philosophy, once, who after years of confusion got maturity and turned to real estate. He is now a multimillionaire. He thinks and is nothing.
That is Adulthood; a functional intelligence; a docile positivist willing to think about 'how' but not 'why'.
Thank Goddess most people here are not very good adults! It was the liberation of my soul to find a station in life where I will never endure such a curse.
The adolescent, perfected and made powerful, if he can somehow survive, chrysalizes to the homo ludensis who is the artist, or the philosopher, or the true self-employed businessman. The games of adulthood by contrast are a diseased, unreal mutation. A Versailles without frills, reduced to the naked, office-building essence of a house of players jockeying for prestige. Those who truly wish to defend productivity and independence should not look to the 'adult' word of marriage, management, and nine-to-five paper-pushing which chokes up all airspace for real productivity in matter and spirit.
To paraphrase something Walter Kaufmann said about Toynbee, adolescence's laughter is as ultimately serious as adulthood's seriousness is ultimately laughable. Adolescence contains the fire of life that yes- Rand was right- is objectively the fire of steel furnaces and is in actuality the passion of the artists and philosophers. But the world awaiting the adolescent is one that will grant access to that furnace, that concert hall, that podium, only on the conditions passions are already dead. Unless you are fortunate, clever, or have a will of iron.
In truth, it is the social game players in high school who will be respected as adults as fathers and mothers, authorities, bosses, and administrators... and brokers of power.
Please, please, to anyone young,
do not go gentle unto that good night!
Jeanine Ring 
From the table... in, the corner...
They could see a World Reborn!...
So they rose, with
~voices~ ringing!
Oh, I can hear, them now!
The very words that they had sung,
became their last communion.
on a lonely barricade.
At dawn.
Oh, my friends, my friends,
forgive me.
For I live, and you are gone.
There's a grief that can't be spoken.
Yet the pain, goes on and on.
Phantom faces at the window.
Empty shadows on the floor.
Empty chairs and empty tables.
Where my friends,.. will meet.
No more.
(Les Miserables musical)
For all of those never adult whom I once loved.
They are all adult now, and dead.
(Edited by Jeanine Ring on 10/21, 12:14am)
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