I know the gutter, and I know the stink of the street; kicked like a dog, I have spat out the bile of defeat. All you beauties who towered above me, you who gave me the smack of your rod now I give you the gutter, I give you the judgement of God!
Vengeance victorious!
These are the glorious days ....
It was a world of irresistible gaiety. It was made of the music that tinkled arrogantly against crystal ovals of brilliance strung across the vast solemnity of the ceiling music that danced defiantly on the soft, faded elegance of velvet drapery and on the stern white marble of glistening walls music that surged upward through the stately grandeur of the opera house, carrying, in its rise, the laughter of a weightless exultation. It was made of graceful bodies whirling in effortless motion on a stage held in light rays, of silk gowns and radiant smiles and gleaming top hats against the backdrop of a huge window which framed the painted image of lighted streets and the skyscrapers of a foreign city, sparkling and beckoning in the distance.
Beyond the walls of the theater beyond the reach of the operetta was a city of unending grayness: the grayness of crumbling buildings and crumbling souls, of stooped shoulders and bread lines and ration cards, of chronic hunger and chronic despair and the odor of disinfectants, of steel bayonets and barbed wire, and marching feet moving in a grim parade of death to sudden arrests in the night, of weary men crushed to their knees under waving flags and clenched fists. Only the flags and the fists relieved the grayness: the fists were stained, by a different dye, the same red as the flags. The city was Petrograd. The year was 1922.
A slender young girl with large eyes sat high in the last balcony of the opera house, leaning forward tensely, listening to the meaning of the most ecstatic sounds she had ever heard. The bright notes sparkling and leaping in the air around her and the reckless gaiety of the scene spread out on the stage below, were carrying a message to her, and a promise. They told her there was a sunlit, carefree world a world of unobstructed action, of unobstructed fulfillment somewhere beyond the dark night and the darker horrors, and it waited only for her to claim it.
She listened with grave solemnity to the promise and she gave a promise in return: that if she could not be the physical citizen of that glittering world, she would be its spiritual citizen. She took her oath of allegiance, with passionate dedication with the gay score of an operetta as the holy bible on which she swore an oath never to let the reality of her true homeland be dimmed by the gray exhaustion of a life lived under the alien weight of the ugly, the sordid, the tragic; to hold the worship of joy as her shield against the sunless murk around her; to keep burning within her that fuel which alone could carry her to the world she had to reach, the fuel which had kept her moving through her seventeen years: the sense of life as an exalted, demanding, triumphant adventure.
Barbara Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand?* (writing about Rand while heavily imitating Rands own writing style)
* Barbara Branden wrote two biographies of Rand a short, purely adulatory one as part of Who Is Ayn Rand? in 1962 when she was part of Rands inner circle, and a longer, more mixed one, The Passion of Ayn Rand in 1986 after she had broken with Rand.
I was in my early teens during the Russian civil war. I lived in a small town that changed hands many times. When it was occupied by the White Army, I almost longed for the return of the Red Army, and vice versa. ... There was not much difference between them in practice, but there was in theory. The Red Army stood for totalitarian dictatorship and rule by terror. The White Army stood for nothing; repeat: nothing. In answer to the monstrous evil they were fighting, the Whites found nothing better to proclaim than the dustiest, smelliest bromides of the time: we must fight, they said, for Holy Mother Russia, for faith and tradition. (Voice of Reason, p. 138)
Standing with the other passengers, her back to the bandits guns, her body trembling under her rough sweater and old black skirt, the night stretching bleakly around her, she wondered if she would die. If it is the end she thought still, I have had something great in my life. I have had the image of Enjolras. If Im going to be shot, Ill think of him at the last, Ill think of how he faced death. I want to die as well as he did. I want to be worthy of him. I want to die in my kind of world.
After what seemed an eternity of time, the passengers were ordered back into their carts, and allowed to continue their journey. (Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, p. 30)
Natasha, Nora, Ayn (Alisa) | Zinovy, Ayn (Alisa), Natasha, Anna, Nora |
When Rand was five or so, she recalled, her mother came into the childrens playroom and found the floor littered with toys. She announced to Rand and Rands two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Natasha, that they would have to choose some of their toys to put away, and some to keep and play with now; in a year, she told them, they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away. Natasha held on to the toys she liked best, but Rand, imagining the pleasure she would get from having her favorite toys returned to her later, handed over her best-loved playthings, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken she could describe vividly fifty years later. When the time came to make the swap and Rand asked for her toys back, her mother looked amused, Rand recalled. Anna explained that she had given everything to an orphanage, on the premise that if her daughters had really wanted their toys they wouldnt have relinquished them in the first place. (Anne Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, pp. 7-8)
Eunice stood on the stool, and, finding herself at the level of the statue, cast her arms suddenly around its neck; then, throwing back her golden hair, and pressing her rosy body to the white marble, she pressed her lips with ecstasy to the cold lips of Petronius. (Quo Vadis, ch. 1)
The spirit of beauty is higher than the spirit of religion. It is the triumphant hymn of man to his own sacredness. It is the sublime claim of a god-like being to transcend all gods.
Professor Leskov had the blue eyes of a child, the blond beard of a Greek statue, the sunken chest of a consumptive and the chair of the History of Esthetics at the State University of Petrograd. His lectures were held in the largest auditorium, but he still had to turn his eyes, occasionally, down to the floor, in order not to miss any of his audience; for part of that audience had to sit on the floor in the aisles. No auditorium had ever been large enough for Professor Leskovs lectures. There were few red bandannas in his audience, and few leather jackets. Professor Leskov had never been known to explain the Venus de Milo by the state of the economic means of production in ancient Greece. He was known to speak Latin better than Russian, to talk of each masterpiece of art since the beginning of history tenderly and intimately, as if children of his mind, and to shrug in surprise when his learned colleagues in the Scientific Academies of Europe called him great. He spoke his lectures fiercely and solemnly, as if he were delivering a sermon, and the silence of his auditorium was that of a cathedral. ...
Kira sat on the edge of a bench in the front row. Sometimes, the childish blue eyes roving over the auditorium stopped for a short second on the wide, gray ones under strange, broken eyebrows.
(quoted in Essays on We the Living, p. 5)
Nikolai Lossky | Aleksandr Vvedensky |
We the Living: Original 1936 Text | We the Living: 1957 Revision |
---|---|
Havent you ever wanted a thing for no reason of right or wrong, for no reason at all, save one: that you wanted it? | Havent you ever wanted a thing for no reason save one: that you wanted it? |
I know what youre going to say. Youre going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.
I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believe ones right, one shouldnt wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. Except that I dont know, however, whether Id include blood in my methods. Why not? Anyone can sacrifice his own life for an idea. How many know the devotion that makes you capable of sacrificing other lives? Horrible, isnt it? Admirable. If youre right. But are you right? |
I know what youre going to say. Youre going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.
I loathe your ideals. |
Dont you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worth leaving alive? | Dont you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? |
Dont you know, he asked, that we cant sacrifice millions for the sake of the few? You can! You must! When those few are the best. Deny the best its right to the top and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but millions of puny, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I dont see why one should want to make them equal. And because I loathe most of them. |
Dont you know, he asked, that we cant sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?
Can you sacrifice the few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one cant treat them as if they were. And because I loathe most of them. |
You have a right to kill, as all fighters have. But no one before you has ever thought of forbidding life to those still living. | You may claim the right to kill, as all fighters do. But no one before you has ever thought of forbidding life to those still living. |
a) Innatism: treating superior character traits as largely inborn, and so necessarily restricted to a few, rather than something open to anyone to achieve.
b) Immoralism: treating those of superior character as exempt from ordinary moral rules.
c) Political elitism: more specifically, treating those of superior character as having the right to rule and dominate those of inferior character.
d) Subjectivism: an emphasis on will over reason, and on sheer personal preference over moral principle.
To accept or obey blindly is the only original sin for man .... Within the specific sphere of his own action, his job, his life, his active concerns, he must understand what he is doing to the best of his intelligence; in fact, it is his moral law and the essence of his nature not to touch that which he cannot judge firsthand, not to act without intelligence. ... To force [a lower intellect] against his wishes or understanding into some wonderful atomic factory where his limited skill can be used to best advantage (by the masters decision) .... is forcing him into a subhuman state. (Journals, pp. 495-497)
Nietzsche has certain very attractive, very wise quotations purported to uphold individualism with which one could agree out of context. But excepting his general feeling for individualism, I would not consider Nietzsche an individualist; and above all, he is certainly not an upholder of reason. ... I dont want to be confused with Nietzsche in any respect. (quoted in Essays on We the Living, p. 237)
Nietzsche says splendid things, often, indeed, Anarchist things, but he is no Anarchist. It is for the Anarchists, then, to intellectually exploit this would-be exploiter. He may be utilized profitably, but not prophetably.