How did you discover Ayn Rand's ideas?

Joe, I agree--that really was beautiful.

Ed

Post 21

Saturday, April 16, 2005 - 1:39pm

Ed,

Yes, that is exactly what happened.

Post 22

Saturday, April 16, 2005 - 2:06pm

What a great story, Adam!

I had heard of (and personally experienced) the can't-put-the-book-down effect, but your experience definitely takes the cake!

In creative jest, I picture you earnestly reading Anthem through an earthquake (using one hand to hold the book, and the other to hang on with--except for when you need to turn the pages), through a robbery (at one time, you have to lift the book up high while reading it--so that the robbers could get through the narrow aisle), and through a tornado that had just ripped the roof off of the bookstore (trying to surround the book with your body--so that the wind wouldn't be able to turn the pages before you were done reading them).

Thanks for inspiring those visions, Adam.

Ed

Post 23

Saturday, April 16, 2005 - 4:03pm

And Ed, thank you for those. That was fun to read, and I can picture all of the scenarios exactly. :)

Post 24

Saturday, April 16, 2005 - 4:41pm

Adam, that's great! I know that feeling...and ANTHEM is short enough to read in a bookstore without taking up residency...

Post 25

Saturday, April 16, 2005 - 5:24pm

What a wonderful thread and what fascinating stories :-)

I told my own story in a Free Radical article subsequently published on SOLOHQ here.

Post 26

Sunday, April 17, 2005 - 6:59pm

Ahh, but it was my pleasure, Jennifer.

Though your appreciation is certainly appreciated,
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson
on 4/17, 7:00pm)

Post 27

Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - 12:33pm

I appreciated everyone's responses to this question. I'm a little surprised that our resident lurkers (I know you're out there, people!) didn't respond to such an innocuous question. You'd think more people would be eager to share their story.

Jason

Post 28

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - 6:30pm

Well I am so new to Ayn Rand's ideas that it seems silly to even document it, but I'm so excited to find a topic I actually feel competent to weigh in on so here goes�

Among the books at my family home was a beat-up paperback copy of The Fountainhead. I recall my mother describing it as "an odd book." Twice in my young adult days I picked it up and never made it past the first 30 pages.

Then last year I started dating an Objectivist. As a former Catholic with a lazy and vaguely liberal worldview who never had the inclination to define my own beliefs, I was intrigued. The more I learned about Objectivism the more I liked. But there it was, hanging before me - The Fountainhead! This time I was determine to get through it. And boy was it a struggle. It took 200 pages before I was reading out of anything other than sheer will. Upon reaching the end, I cursed the book because I realized I'd have to read it again! So rich and compelling a book demands multiple readings, and so I can only hope that my view of first 200 pages will have changed after having read the entire work.

And now I've started on Atlas, and am happy to be instantly immersed in the story. Still along way to go for me (both in Atlas and in Objectivism). I am being very stubborn and not swallowing all this whole. I'm not content to believe in something just because my boyfriend does. But I feel alive just by questioning my motivations for what I do. It's as if I've been sleepwalking through life, and have bolted awake into a place that is unfamiliar but very exciting.

Post 29

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - 7:07pm

Good for you, Angela, and welcome. For what it's worth, Atlas also had my immediate attention, and remains to this day my favorite. You might like the Fountainhead more after you finish it. ;)

Warm regards,
Jennifer

Post 30

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - 7:31pm

Angela,
Welcome. And may I express my envy at your 'first time' experiences. I remember them and often wish, per impossible, that I could erase everything I know and read it all fresh. (Not to gainsay the value of having read it a dozen times, which has it's own satisfactions.)

What an adventure you are embarking on!

Jeff

Post 31

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - 7:40pm

Angela, I second the welcome (or "third" it, I suppose). If nothing else, you are discovering philosophy and learning to apply reason to fundamental questions about existence, how to live your life, how to interact with others, politics, etc.

Even if you don't come away from this a died-in-the-wool Objectivist, you will have a more keen sense of where you stand on these issues.

Post 32

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - 8:07pm

I had an experience similiar to Adam...

I was about 12 or 13 with my parents visiting friends across town, and while bored picked up Anthem. I read the whole book and fell in love with it, but after we left I completely forgot the name of the author or the title of the book.

I searched for years after that for the book, just remembering that it was a slim paperback. We went back to the friends house later, and I couldnt find it there either.

Then, when I was 17 in High school and a republican conservative, I started arguing with a libertarian who was consistently more free market and individual rights than I was (which both annoyed and exasperated me). After we graduated I admitted his ideas were intriguing, and he gave me a book called "Capitalsim the Unknown Ideal". It explained things in a way I thought no one else had ever thought of besides me. I resolved to go to the bookstore and buy ALL of that authors books.

When I sat down to begin reading them in as near as chronological order as I could figure, I opened up "Anthem" and began reading.

Perhaps I got through half a paragraph before stopping. And the nearest I could translate what ran through my mind as I realized what I held in my hands finally, would be the line from Atlas Shrugged when Dagny sees Galt for the first time: "But of course."

Post 33

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - 8:50pm

I like Steve's story.

Anyways, my first encounter with Rand was my freshman year of high school. Incidentally, Anthem was assigned to the whole class; I was fourteen. I loved the book from the beginning; I felt for it what I did for Winston Smith, Huxley's Savage, Eugene Zamiatin, and Guy Montag.

I wrote an essay on Anthem, and won $30 for it, and continued to The Fountainhead and Atlas. Yeah, my story's pretty ordinary, but I wonder what made the department decide to teach it. In fact, I think I will ask tomorrow, or at least soon.

Perhaps I should be comforted, because I noticed that in most of the older people's stories (I am a high school junior), Rand was discovered accidentally, but in my case, it was because someone felt she would be good for us, and perhaps this indicates that Ms. Rand's ideas are spreading in an organized way.

Michael

(Edited by Mike Yarbrough on 5/12, 9:43pm)

Post 34

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - 9:03pm

My best friend in 1989 bought me The Fountainhead and told me I had to read it because I was just like the main character. I put the book on a stack of other unread books and forgot what he said. Two years later, while looking at an even larger stack in the same place, I remembered what he said. I pulled out the middle book. One hundred pages into the book, I called him and said, "This is gonna have an unhappy ending, isn't it? There's no way this guy's gonna win. She (Rand) won't let him win!"

"Just read it," my friend said.

I did, and I no longer felt small in a big universe. I felt as big as the universe. I felt that MY life was important and MINE to make happy, no matter what anyone else said. I read all of Rand's works in huge gulps over the ensuing few months.

But The Fountainhead changed my life. My friend was wrong about me being like Roark. I wasn't anything like him. I was second-handed. I didn't pursue my values like he did. And Christianity still had its meathooks in me. I thought I was an individualist, and I acted like an individualist, but I was losing the battle for ideas in my own head. (I had just written a column for a local paper demanding that the city build more sidewalks.) I'd been trying to figure "it all out" since I was a kid but hadn't the morality, genius and tenacity of Rand. At first, I cussed myself for not having done what she did. Soon, I realized I was indebted to her for my life and happiness.

I went through my "newly converted" stage, as Jennifer did, where I argued with everyone and was altogether righteous. It took about 7 years for me to get right -- to learn it was for me to be happy, not make everyone else happy and rational. And to enjoy the subsequent emotions, as Robert Malcom mentioned.

Post 35

Friday, May 13, 2005 - 12:07am

Great stories here.

I read Anthem in 10th grade (Neil Peart of Rush was certainly a factor) and enjoyed it very much. But I wasn't motivated to read until the major elements of my life were clashing with one another at around age 25. I was living with a gal I had no business with; I had no idea what to do with my skills as a musician; both my romantic life and professional life were tied into a religion I didn't believe in but didn't know where else to go.

At the bottom of the barrel in Newark, Delaware I went into a new Border's bookstore near the Christiana Mall. I bought Hegel's The Philosophy of History and Rand's Romantic Manifesto. I tried the Hegel in earnest and couldn't get anywhere with it. Then I opened the Romantic Manifesto and everything changed. A star lit up in my soul.

Ed, I too found Peck's The Road Less Travelled to be an inspiration and I also thank C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, The Four Loves, etc.) for being a fine philosophical primer. He isn't philosophical from where I stand today but he was a bridge from that world into this one.

I later read a lot of other philosophers for my philosophy degree. The pre-Socratics from Thales to Heraclitas on to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. And the medieval Christian dudes on up to Aquinas. And then Descartes, Hume, Kant, Berkeley, Nietzsche on to Sartre. If anyone is semi-inclined to understand Rand in context do yourself a favor and get to know these guys too.

Keep the stories comin'!

(Edited by Lance Moore on 5/13, 12:14am)

Post 36

Friday, May 13, 2005 - 2:50am

This is one good reason to reading Jones' set of history of philosophy, for those not into it as a major, but wanting understanding, thru exerpts, of the context in which her philosophy evolved.

Post 37

Friday, May 13, 2005 - 10:04am

Multi-step, multi-year process for me. I couldn't put each book down but no one book made me an Objectivist. Fountainhead was recommended by another summer camp counselor when I was in my early teens (13 or 14, I think). I loved it, but I was on the premise you shouldn't just read one author, but a little of everybody, so I didn't follow up till two weeks before finals my freshman year in college when I picked up Atlas and it blew me away. The universe I'd wanted and needed.

But even this awesome sense of life experience wasn't enough.

I wasn't convinced it would completely work in the real world, with non-fantasy people. What if everyone was selfish? Wouldn't it be cutthroat? The final step was senior year reading Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, more compressed eye-opening brilliance and intellectual horsepower than anything the college professors had on their reading lists for us. That's the one book of her nonfiction works I recommed, because it gives you from the wide view of a whole society an understanding of the whole system.

So I started an Ayn Rand club on my campus...and began to work my way through the back issues of The Objectivist.

[Angela] "now I've started on Atlas...I am being very stubborn and not swallowing all this whole."

This is an excellent approach!! Lots of people make the mistake of swallowing too eagerly and suddenly [whether it be Objectivism or any other complex set of ideas ] without digesting, questioning, integrating. You get an upset stomach or an indigestible lump where a working philosophy could have been. "Sounds good in a novel, but how would she answer x?..."

--Philip Coates

Post 38

Friday, May 13, 2005 - 12:12pm

but I'm so excited to find a topic I actually feel competent to weigh in on so here goes�

Angela, thanks for weighing in! I realize it can be daunting when so many here so passionately defend their ideas and positions, but no one's worth being mum over. Jump right in!

One of my reasons for starting this thread was to have a place where newbies could add their own voices to a topic we should all be experts in - ourselves! Another reason, of course, was simply a desire to hear all the fascinating ways people came to discover Rand's ideas. Not only is it downright interesting, it might also give we 'soldiers' some ideas for the next battlefront.

Jason

Post 39

Friday, May 13, 2005 - 12:27pm