(Marin is sailor in French, as everyone knows, of course).

Perhaps everyone should be held accountable for the expression of his or her deepest conviction.  For Ayn Rand, it is that A will always be A, and never non A.  (If you laugh at that, then you won’t continue reading Ayn Rand, even though you may make it to the end of the book out of stubbornness, or some strange faithfulness to the sense of who you are)  For John Keats, his deepest and most personal conviction was that life is a task of ever-growing consciousness, which must encompass a wider and wider range of knowledge and experience, harmonized from time to time by the repeated, often obsessive awareness that moments of unity between the self and the world and the supreme ideal, around which the entire act of living must be organized.  We the living: this is our task.

I’m not sure what Ayn Rand would say about John Keats.  Perhaps she would say that somehow he is lacking in manly virtues.  We’ll never know, except if she wrote something about him somewhere.  I certainly don’t know, and probably never will, because I don’t think I’ll read any new Ayn Rand between now and my demise.  But there too, you never know.  One thing is sure: she would agree with the point of differentiation between late Keats and late Wordsworth: the latter was occupied and busied and obsesses wtih backward looking memories and elegies of past perfection, including movements that would lead him back to the Church, whereas Keats maintained a resolutely forward-looking approach to life as constant education and improvement, if not progress.

One thing Ayn Rand could (perhaps) never agree to would be all the fuss Keats made over his encounter with Fanny Brawne.  This was something that threw him for a loop, and made him feel like throwing all his past accomplishments overboard, in the incadescent heat of physical love, making all else pale in comparison.  With Ayn Rand, love has to be subservient to logic, or strictly identical.  Love is not for her a question of unity, but of identity.  A is A.  So, in that fine book, Atlas Shrugged, she will make passionate love to three men over a span of about 15 years.  First d’Anconia, then Hank Rearden, and finally, the ultimate apotheosis, John Galt himself.  Following her stand and conviction, her deepest conviction, these three experiences will have to be, in the final analysis, the same experience: an experience of herself, someone who has not evolved, not changed, not thrown anything overboard except mistakes, since the age of 16.  Each lover is an opportunity for her to feel this sense of continuity, this sense of self which is glorious and ecstatic, and for the reader — this one at least — perfectly unforgettable.  But questionable now, on a huge mole-hill of experience on the brink of slipping into oblivion.  The only thing we have to go on is what she writes about in AS (Atlas Shrugged) but it is enough to fill anyone’s cup, at least for awhile.  I’m not convinced, but for a long time I was persuaded that she was in the know, and right.  I wouldn’t be in such anxious expectation to see “Bright Star” by Jane Campion if I had remained a randy randian.  But it was great to go through that, although now I must apologize to many people for the huge detour this momentary capture occasioned.

Another subject altogether, but still focused on her deepest and most personal conviction that a sense of self can be ground in the logic of identity.  What is it that happens in AS, if not a revoloution?  What, at bottom, is the secret spring of our passion for this book if not the excellent portrayal of the excitement and audacity of a revolutionary spirit?  I sit betwixt the memories and the formation (shaping) of two Russian emigrants.  Ayn Rand, on the right, and Alexander Kojève on the left.  More on Kojève in the future, supposing anybody over there cares.  So, one could perhaps distinguish between a conservative and a communist revolution.  But A is A.  A revolution is, and has to be, identical to its concept.  I think Ayn Rand’s fits the bill.  It is truly a revolution, as close to the communist one as it is distant from the conservative ones Reagan talked about.  And of course filled chuck full with all kinds of problems.  But I have already made enough statements here to fill countless books, and the point is not to write a book, but to accompany someone reading a book that I could never write, but read with passion and damage.

A final remark.  At one point, you have to move outside the book.  You have the play the game of comparative literature, and place the book in the history of philosophy.  It is remarkable that between the publication of the book in 1957 and her death in 1982, there was no more fiction.  And think she would say this was because AS was absolutely perfect.  This is why we all admired Ayn Rand.  She was capable of saying things like that.  But following the publication of this great or little piece of perfection, the world came running to her, in praise or in criticism, and she had to respond, or, perhaps she might have said, she chose to respond.  In terms of business, of art, and of political philosophy.  It’s far less convincing than the fiction, with the exception of the Romantic Manifesto, which gives, as you did, Marin, so many tips as to what could be read, and what should be read.  (You, for the moment, are too modest to move from possibility to actuality, like Aristotle did, and like Ayn Rand did, but eventually I hope you’ll take that leap.  It will be a watershed moment requiring unification more than confirmation of identity.)  It’s fascinating to see in the Romantic Manifesto what she thinks deseres to be read.  Victor Hugo for example.  The man who laughes, and 93, another book about revolution.  America was born in revolution, but I don’t think, like she does, that it can be adequately summed up in the dollar sign.  But that is another logos (story).

I’m enjoying the fiction of having someone to respond to.  Like Ayn Rand and like Nietzsche, it doesn’t have to incarnate itself like God the Father planned with his son.  I don’t need incarnation, (or perhaps need it more than anything else, as Keats discovered with Fanny), I just need to try to remain faithful to the task of setting out my life.  Not grand style, just a semblance of style.