A High and Lonely Destiny

It's slow going. Reading Atlas Shrugged is not providing me with one of those transforming philosophical/literary experiences. This isn't Brothers Karamazov or The Stranger. It seems more analogous to one of those long, long road-trips on superslab, where the scenery is just endless sameness and the only thing to break up the journey is keeping tabs on the mile markers. And they seem to go by with way too little frequency.

Ayn Rand does have a rather..cough...interesting style as a writer. She manages, somehow, to be both flowery and coldly inaccessible at the same time. Hers is a form of romanticism that seems to have sprung from the industrial 20th century, and her writing, for me, is like trying to read the music of Wagner. It's big, bombastic, and on a scale that has little to do with lesser mortals. The emotional subtleties of actual human existence are nowhere to be found. Every moment is a grand and towering gesture, all brass and kettledrums, brimming over with Meaning with a capital M. And yet, in the thick of all that fervor, it seems strangely inhuman.

Her characters...at least, the ones she presents as moral exemplars...all have an aesthete's disregard for every human being who does not meet their standards of profit, power, and pursuit of self-interest. Again and again in the first 100 pages we hear from them that human beings generally...and Mexicans in particular...are worthless parasites living off of the creative genius of a few glorious demigods.

As I settle in with Ayn Rand's band of sternly romantic, self-absorbed, and emotionally distant protagonists, I find that they remind me of someone else, someone from another story I first read long ago. That someone is Jadis, Queen of Charn. As she puts it in the Magician's Nephew:

You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.

That the White Witch of Narnia would be a heroine in Atlas Shrugged is, I think, rather telling.

Jesus Is My Boyfriend

A theme I've seen recurring is the juxtaposition of love for God and romantic love, and I'm of two minds about it.

On the one hand, that sense of "being in love with God" is at the heart of most Christian mysticism and monastic life. That desire to know the presence of God can be powerful, and those times when that presence is felt are as rewarding as any in this life. It is love, love in it's purest and highest form. And it certainly has resonances with the vocabulary of romantic love. There've been times in my adult spiritual life where I've been as embarassingly goony as a first-smitten tweener. Like when every song you hear reminds you of God...not just the predigested Christ-pop [stuff], but everything. kd lang's "Save Me," for instance. Or bjork's "Come to Me."

On the other hand, I think that the monastic vocation is the calling of very few--the desert wanderers, the cloistered one with the distant gaze, the dust-encrusted prophet. Most of us are not loosely enfleshed Seraphs. God's gift of love to us is, to my mind, so immense as to demand from most of us that we act instead as conduits. We are to receive it, be filled by it, and pour it outward into all of the other relationships in our lives. Taking up the mind of Christ, so to speak. In this life, at least, that love transforms and builds up our relationships, rather than replacing them.