Did Galt LOVE his work?

[atlashead]

That's the same question as "Did Roark LOVE his life?"

[Brant Gaede]

And the reason you are asking . . . ?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Wrong questions. (AH, not Brant.)

Galt and Roark are characters in two different novels.

They can neither love nor hate anything.

Their creator, Ayn Rand, loved her life and expressed it by creating them as characters in stories.

In the fictional worlds she created, they, as fictional characters, loved their lives as part of the stories. But outside of those stories, out here in real life, they do not inhabit the same world we live in.

They themselves are not real people. So they cannot act. They cannot love. They cannot hate. They are not agents. We are agents. We can act and love and hate.

Their fictional actions and fictional emotions are forever frozen as part of the stories Rand told. They can never change. Nor can they ever change their hearts or minds. We can do both.

They are figments of Rand's imagination communicated through art (storytelling in this case) so they become figments of our imaginations.

That's how art works.

The real question is do you love these figments of imagination and their fictional work and fictional lives? If so, why?

Another really good question is what are you going to do with those figments of imagination?

Pretend they are real people?

 

Michael

[atlashead]

On 4/20/2020 at 10:27 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Wrong questions. (AH, not Brant.)

Galt and Roark are characters in two different novels.

They can neither love nor hate anything.

Their creator, Ayn Rand, loved her life and expressed it by creating them as characters in stories.

In the fictional worlds she created, they, as fictional characters, loved their lives as part of the stories. But outside of those stories, out here in real life, they do not inhabit the same world we live in.

They themselves are not real people. So they cannot act. They cannot love. They cannot hate. They are not agents. We are agents. We can act and love and hate.

Their fictional actions and fictional emotions are forever frozen as part of the stories Rand told. They can never change. Nor can they ever change their hearts or minds. We can do both.

They are figments of Rand's imagination communicated through art (storytelling in this case) so they become figments of our imaginations.

That's how art works.

The real question is do you love these figments of imagination and their fictional work and fictional lives? If so, why?

Another really good question is what are you going to do with those figments of imagination?

Pretend they are real people?

 

Michael

Thanks

[atlashead]

That's interesting you think Rand loved her life so she created her work.  To make a right angle turn: Sometimes one has to change their identity to recognize & realize YOU DO ACTUALLY LOVE YOUR WORK & there IS an element of tradition in it-Promethius of course existed.  But Promethius was a being too.  I have this joke Promethius' best friend was Love...and I'd have to go through my texts to find the end of the joke.  So what I just realized I was looking for was the fountainhead: what thing that can be shared but is spiritual has been crowded around by men that i have been carried away from?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

31 minutes ago, atlashead said:

That's interesting you think Rand loved her life so she created her work.

AH,

And to keep it real, remember that Rand's professional love at first was storytelling--through written stories, but especially through silent films.

It was not philosophy.

Her love of her own life, which she wanted to express through story, carried her to Hollywood where she learned how to create and tell stories with the best of them. She did her own studies, of course, but she was grilled and trained by people who made fortunes with stories at a time when this didn't exist, or at least was first starting. She applied herself and learned.

Not to sound sappy, all this came from love.

(The O-Land way of saying it is that it came from passion, but that means the same thing in this context. )

All the rest came later.

Michael