Very few conservatives worth their salt are unfamiliar with the work of Ayn Rand, and many of us went through some serious flirtation with objectivism as our primary political philosophy. I can remember reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in the summer of 1987 and seeing them as a revelation. Howard Roark and Hank Reardon were the kind of guys I wanted to be, and she created them skillfully.
As time went on and I read more and more of the sort of zany cult following that attended to Ayn Rand in her life (not to mention an interesting personal life), I tended to keep my admiration of the woman a little more in the background. I re-read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in the Summer of 2007 and concluded that my original enthusiasm for objectivism remained strong.
Here are two interviews Mike Wallace did with Ayn Rand in 1959, each is about ten minutes long (Part I and Part II). I'd never heard her voice before, but the heavy Russian accent is a little jarring (sorta like Boris' girl on the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons). The constantly shifting little eyes are also disquieting, but the words are powerful.
Check out also the early TV special effects and Mike Wallace just lighting one up right in the middle of the interview. Classic.
Of course, it isn't the eyes or the appearance, but the ideas, that matter. Delving deeper, it became patently obvious that Rand stood apart from and above hundreds of philosophers whose works have survived two millennia or more.
ReplyDeleteRead her non-fiction, then re-read her fiction. The effect is shocking and life altering.