What Ayn Rand really thought of C.S.Lewis

[GrayMouser]

"Cheap driveling non-entity", "abysmal caricature", "cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta*physical mediocrity," and "abysmal scum" (and more!)- if you've ever read her works, you'll have noticed she tends to repeat herself.

It's funny to see all these right-wingers in America wrapping themselves in both Jesus and Ayn Rand, when the one thing she hated as much as socialism was religion.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/fir...ted-c-s-lewis/

and ooops, looks like you can't edit thread titles

[Valandil]

Originally Posted by GrayMouser

:
:
and ooops, looks like you can't edit thread titles

We mods can. What would you like the title to be?

[Earniel]

I suspect he meant the small typo. (Now corrected)

I had to look up Ayn Rand. I've been hearing her name and books here and there mentioned with much reference but for the rest, didn't know squidly. But as philosophy ain't my thing, I can now see why.

As for these comments, I wonder, did she mean for this to publish? Or did someone simply take her old books and print everything she wrote in the margin? If the latter, I hope no one does that ever with my philosophy schoolbook...

[hectorberlioz]

Graymouser, it's okay, not all right-wingers love Ayn Rand. Some of us dislike her mightily (most especially her utopic vision of selfishness).

No love here for Ayn Rand.

[hectorberlioz]

Originally Posted by Eärniel

As for these comments, I wonder, did she mean for this to publish? Or did someone simply take her old books and print everything she wrote in the margin? If the latter, I hope no one does that ever with my philosophy schoolbook...

Yes, or my juvenile sketch book

[hectorberlioz]

Wow. I just went and read her comments at the First Things article. She was even more juvenile than I thought.

[Earniel]

Originally Posted by hectorberlioz

Yes, or my juvenile sketch book

There is a reason why I keep those things under lock and key.

Originally Posted by hectorberlioz

Wow. I just went and read her comments at the First Things article. She was even more juvenile than I thought.

One of the reasons I wondered whether she intended to publish this. It sounds a lot like the stuff a teenager would write when they disagreed with something in their text books. But personally I'd write it in my notes, writing commentary on a textbook always felt like vandalising (and we usually had to sell them on).

[Valandil]

I wonder if she ever had anything to say about JRRT.

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by Valandil

We mods can. What would you like the title to be?

Yeah, Earniel was right; the typo. I just hate to distract our august Mods with such trivial matters
And thanks for fixing.

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by Eärniel

There is a reason why I keep those things under lock and key.


One of the reasons I wondered whether she intended to publish this. It sounds a lot like the stuff a teenager would write when they disagreed with something in their text books. But personally I'd write it in my notes, writing commentary on a textbook always felt like vandalising (and we usually had to sell them on).

Yes, it was marginalia- personal opinions jotted down in her own copy of the book, so not intended for publishing- but given what she did publish, I doubt if any qualms about moderation or decorum would have held her back.

Actually a lot of the stuff she wrote sounds like it came from a teenager.

The famous quote from blogger Kung Fu Monkey:

Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.”

[Earniel]

Originally Posted by GrayMouser

Yeah, Earniel was right; the typo. I just hate to distract our august Mods with such trivial matters
And thanks for fixing.

Eh, we're having so little to do lately we'd probably all jump at the chance to mod something.

Originally Posted by GrayMouser

The famous quote from blogger Kung Fu Monkey:

Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.”

... I see. That might explain a lot about the tone of the margin comments.

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by Eärniel

There is a reason why I keep those things under lock and key.


One of the reasons I wondered whether she intended to publish this. It sounds a lot like the stuff a teenager would write when they disagreed with something in their text books. But personally I'd write it in my notes, writing commentary on a textbook always felt like vandalising (and we usually had to sell them on).

Coleridge sounds like he could be pretty savage himself:

Of course, the marginalia that corrected, quarrelled, and attacked—“hostile marginalia,” as they’re called—were the most fun. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s copy of “Joan of Arc,” by Robert Southey,* Coleridge came up with so many objections that he had to abbreviate them, as in “L.M.,” for “ludicrous metaphor,” and “N.,” for “nonsense.” Like a censorious teacher, Coleridge wrote his comments in red ink, filling the margins and causing him to remark, “Mercy on us, if I go on thus I shall make the book what I suppose it never was before, red all thro’.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/0...#ixzz2P7JwlDBJ

And this:

A few of the marginalia in the books were wordless—for example, in Jack Kerouac’s copy of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” by Henry David Thoreau. Kerouac possessed this book but did not own it, having borrowed it from a local library in 1949 and never brought it back. On page 227, this sentence—“The traveller must be born again on the road”—was underlined in pencil, with a small, neat check mark beside it.