Tuesday, March 27, 2018
This morning on my walk from Dunkin’ Donuts to the library, I stopped at the corner of Fayette and St. Paul Sts. to finish a cigarette, before I’d go into the convenience store. To my right, on a bench, sat this woman, bent over with her head between her knees; she had turned her head to the left and was calling to me. I couldn’t make out her words. She is a “taker.” Sometimes I respond to such folk with compassion; sometimes I respond with contempt.
How would Ayn Rand have responded?
I know practically nothing about Ayn Rand except what I’ve read at Wikipedia.
However, on re-reading the article just now, I find the current version of same to include almost none of what I know, or what I think counts. So I won’t link there. I’ll link here instead; this is a New York Magazine book review:
Rand came to this country from Russia either with significant inherited wealth or — I don’t know what to say. She soon enough found her way into a magical world where people get paid enough to support themselves, by giving public lectures outside academia.
The Wikipedia article as currently written does not include either of the words “depression” or “moochers,” though both are prominent in what I have read about her before.
“Moochers” was her term for the poor. One can Google “moochers Ayn Rand” to find what she said of them.
The version of the article I recall having read years ago, indicated that in the final decades of her life (The current article on her paramour Nathaniel Branden indicates this may have begun in 1957.) Rand suffered completely debilitating depression.
She had spent decades presenting herself as a truly exalted figure. Some of this may reflect her use of amphetamines. If, indeed, she spent those same decades holding those “below” her in contempt, then in the last decades of her life, she may have met her comeuppance.
“The last shall be first, and the first last.”
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