I recently decided to give ol’ Ayn’s magnum opus a fair shake, after years of dismissing it as the ramblings of a half-mad, hateful shrew. I’m only a few pages in, and I have to admit… I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The imagery is copious and often stunning and/or stunningly copious: “[The Oak Tree] meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness-and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.”
Let’s break this down: the memory of the oak tree is a faint tinge of sadness, and it’s also a drop of pain, which is more specifically a raindrop and somehow also a question mark. Jeepers!
As for said oak tree, holy foreshadowing! It “…was his greatest symbol of strength. One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it in the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell: its heart had rotted away long ago.” Gosh, I sure hope that oak tree doesn’t represent America! That would probably be too obvious, though.
I can’t wait until John Galt shows up and saves the day!
posted by bootybass
I read a review of a new biography about Ms. Rand yesterday actually.
it made me interested in reading the fountain head. After reading that one sentence I think I lost interest.