Hello, my name is Faith
Posted by LennoxStudios 5 years, 6 months ago to The Gulch: Introductions
I cannot describe how happy I am to be here. I recall the first time I read Atlas Shrugged, and I learned of Galt's Gulch, I had to set the book down, as I began to cry. Because all I could think, was that there would never be a place for people like me. This may be an online website, but it's the best thing I've ever found.
Now, I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time a few years before this site started. Many times when reading I had to put the book down to laugh making loud chokes and snorts.
The book written > 50 years before was accurately describing current political/economic life. ( Place: Australia. Time: years 2010 to 2013. What: Julia-the-Red was then the Prime Minister.)
You say cry but I think a similar reaction.
What this book is to me is a slur of irritation, happiness, sadness, and relief, inspiration, and another emotion I've never been able to place.
I do believe we had a similar reaction.
The fact that Ayn Rand wrote the novel over 60 years ago along with its widespread popularity should lead one to the opposite conclusion: that there are many people who love the novel and that, for a rational egoist, the place for people like you is in your life. There is no place in such a person's life for people who are not like them.
Anyway, I do like your name, as a name, but I urge you to take nothing and no one here on faith.
On that basis, I welcome you and hope to hear from you further.
-Jae
As a linguist, I too am a glutton for rational discourse (a scarce "commodity" these days). My personal goal for the last couple years has been to gain a deeper understanding of Objectivist principles by progressively memorizing, reciting and thereby inducing the Galt Speech, paragraph by paragraph.
Though I have an unexceptional memory, as a young child, my religious father was always instructing me to memorize passages of the Bible and I really took to it (not the dogma but the praxis) so it seemed irresistible that I would do that with the "bible" of my philosophy.
I'm most particularly interested in meeting and working with those of a similar bent. I made it to about GS-106 almost a year ago, but have made no progress since other than to keep up with the daily recitations.
I could try and guess the answer, but the first question I usually ask of Atlas or Fountainhead readers is which character do they most closely identify with, personally or psychologically. My own answer would likely shock you (it's not Galt).
I find that a difficult question to answer actually. Multiple characters spoke out to me, and reminded me of myself. But if it comes down to it, I'd have to say Hank Rearden.
I'd quite like to know who you related to. Also, what would you have guessed for who I related to? I'm a deductionist, so I always find things like that interesting.
"He saw an evening when he sat slumped across his desk in that office. It was late and his staff had left; so he could lie there alone, unwitnessed. He was tired. It was as if he had run a race against his own body, and all the exhaustion of years, which he refused to acknowledge, had caught him at once and flattened him against the desktop. He felt nothing, except the desire not to move. He did not have the strength to feel--not even to suffer. He had burned everything there was to burn within him; he had scattered so many sparks to start so many things--and he wondered whether someone could give him now the spark he needed, now when he felt unable ever to rise again. He asked himself who had started him and kept him going. Then he raised his head. Slowly, with the greatest effort of his life, he made his body rise until he was able to sit upright with only one hand pressed to the desk and a trembling arm to support him. He never asked that question again.”