| | Prompted by MSK's and Robert M's posts above: "Genius" is a topic worthy of its own thread.
Vardis Wolf, Kay Nolte Smith's fictional heroine in Elegy for a Soprano, was based on a composite of at least three real persons -- Rand was one, and I believe Smith said that Maria Callas was another (I can't recall the third). From the biographical material I've seen about Callas, she was strikingly similar to Rand in certain aspects of temperament, style and self-assessment.
One observation I can safely make about many geniuses I've read about is that they often can't grasp why other people "just don't get it," when some idea or observation seems so simple and obvious to them. This tends to make many geniuses suspicious of or impatient with what they view as rampant stupidity and evasion around them -- a perspective that comes across to those around them as imperious and arrogant. In a way, it's the opposite of a psychological "blind spot": it's their capacity to see certain things much more easily and clearly than most people.
In Rand's case, we of course have no access to her inner thought processes, except for the clues provided by her statements, public appearances, writings and the testimony of those who knew her. But at least one aspect of how her mind worked seems to manifest itself in all of these accounts.
Reading her fiction, essays, letters and journals, I am struck by the fact that she did, as Michael says above, look at the world primarily as an artist or dramatist would. Rand was, above all, a Romantic visionary: to the subject of philosophy, she brought the artist's perceptual ability to concretize abstractions. I believe she literally "saw" abstract ideas, personified and embodied in the world around her. She constantly translated abstractions into metaphors and allegories -- concrete representations and embodiments. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" became the 20th Century Motor story. "Altruism" became her childhood hero, Cyrus, bleeding on a sacrificial altar. "Reason vs. emotionalism" became the Apollo moon landing versus the Woodstock festival. Etc.
This rare ability to marshal art and dramatization in service to her philosophical writing added compelling power and persuasive tangibility, major reasons for its extraordinary accessibility and influence. But in addition, I think Rand's ability or habit of visualizing abstractions had at least two significant consequences for her personality.
First, I think it was the root of her intense passion about ideas. "...I can see the consequences too clearly," she once wrote about the reason for her courageous, embattled fight for her values. Because she could literally "see" the consequences of ideas, "see" her Ideal Man, "see" the flow of history as a war between the flag-bearers of good and evil premises, she became and remained extremely passionate about it all. Hers were no dispassionate, analytical dissections of esoteric ideas; they were personal, emotional thunderbolts of logic hurled at her philosophical enemies. She also thought of herself and her own historic role in dramatic, metaphorical terms: for example, as she put it in the introduction to The Romantic Manifesto, as a "bridge" between the Romanticism of the past and of the future. In that respect, she reminds me a lot of both Hugo and Rostand, who similarly viewed themselves in dramatic terms, as playing a pivotal historic role in the battle to advance their artistic visions.
Second, I think this visionary ability was the root of her frequent bursts of impatience with and anger toward others -- particularly toward her followers (something I occasionally witnessed at public events, and once experienced first-hand). Because Rand could see things so clearly, things that seemed to her so obvious and self-evident, those around her who remained several steps behind simply had to be resisting the facts: they had to be willfully evading. When she once was asked what distinguished her from other people, I was struck by her answer; she didn't say anything pertaining to intellect or genius or talent; she answered, "Honesty." I don't think a great visionary like Rand could ever quite grasp that others honestly couldn't see what she could see.
In addition, I've often wondered to myself if Rand's extraordinary talent as a Romantic visionary may have had yet another personal consequence: that it sometimes made the ideal world of her creation more palpable to her than was the world of actual, lesser people around her. Reading her novels, where her heroes are sometimes portrayed as looking off into space, into some distance, holding onto some mental image of their moral ideal...reading biographical material about her, which portrays a woman who (unlike her Dagny) couldn't drive, feared flying and couldn't navigate in a kitchen...I get the impression of a genius who may have preferred the world of her creation to the often frustrating and ugly world around her. I even get the impression that sometimes, in a social or public setting, the reassuring images of Galt or Roark or Francisco were there before her, encouraging her, giving this noble visionary anchors to and reminders of her ideals...
I do not mean to suggest for a moment that Rand was in any way unattached to reality, and certainly not psychotic: no one severed from perceptual reality could have possibly come up with so many keen observations and insights about human psychology and society. But sequestered hour after hour, day after day, year after year in a closed office before a typewriter and a blank sheet of paper, fantasizing about one's ideal heroes and heroines, amounts to "living" inside one's head a lot. From personal experience, I know that during extended periods when I've done that sort of thing, I've tended to develop a kind of "tunnel vision" about people and events; I've sometimes succumbed to deducing long, attenuated chains of rationalistic inferences about them, inferences that later proved invalid. The reason was the lack of sufficient empirical checks and input -- an imbalance between experience and reason in my life.
There's no way I can prove such speculations, of course; they just seem to fit as possible explanations for what is known about Rand's personal life and habits. And the explanations also fit what we can observe about other Romantic visionaries.
I hope it's obvious that none of this is meant to demean Rand in any way. It is only meant to suggest that great ability or talent or genius in a certain area of one's life may sometimes come at a price -- the price being an imbalance, and corresponding deficits in other areas. I view with great sympathy the challenge a genius must face in maintaining balance in his or her life. Not all geniuses have; some have become monsters. But measured by productive work of enormous value to millions, Ayn Rand on the whole managed far better than most.
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