It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!

— Equality 7-2521 from Ayn Rand's book Anthem


My folks had a couple of paperback copies of Ayn Rand books in the house when I was a kid.  I remember seeing paperback copies of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged on the high shelves in the high bookshelves of our home library.  My first real exposure to the work of Ayn Rand was in 1990 during my senior year of high school.  I was taking a miserable course called "Contemporary Issues in Literature" or something like that.  It is something of a miracle that I passed the course given my complete lack of enthusiasm for most things at that point in time.  It was the first class of the day and it is absolutely the truth when I say that I spent much of this class catching up on my beauty sleep.  Most of our class time was spent doing something that I think was called "sustained silent reading."  This basically meant that the teacher really didn't have to teach that much.  We were assigned a number of books to read that year and I don't mind saying that I really didn't appreciate most of them.  The Catcher in the Rye was really good, but I hated the way the teacher had tried to explain and analyze the book.  I didn't care how many times she had read the book — I felt like I knew more about Holden Caulfield than she did!  We read Ordinary People, which I thought was fairly depressing and whiny at the time.  Then we read On the Beach, which was something of a Cold War armageddon-ish yarn (I had already read Steven King's The Stand a few years before and that was pretty much the definitive apocalyptic tale in my mind).  Somewhere in there, we were supposed to read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but I must confess that I never really got around to that one.  But I did read Anthem by Ayn Rand and I was really taken by it.  I was 17 years old and disenchanted with almost everything around me...Was there anything not to like about it back then?  
Anthem 1946 Signet cover
Anthem definitely had a futuristic, science fiction feel to it and this certainly caught my interest as I had been enjoying the work of authors like Alan Dean Foster, Ben Bova, and Arthur C. Clarke for most of my high school days.  The politics behind the story weren't completely lost on me, either.  I often tell the "baby boomers" that I discuss politics with that I consider myself to be as much of a child of the Cold War as anyone who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis.  By the time I was a kid, we didn't "duck and cover" any more…Our teachers would just tell us in some detail what would happen to all of us if the bomb landed on the local military base.  Fun stuff.  Anyway, the point is that the anti-collectivist theme of Anthem was not so objectionable to me after living through eight years of Ronald Reagan.  For me, Anthem struck a particular chord in how the character dealt with acute, institutionalized alienation.  Alienation and the struggle for identity were themes that I really identified with at that point in time.  It would be much later that I learned a different way of explaining and analyzing alienation as a phenomenon.  At the time, I accepted that the needs of the individual were paramount and that collectivism was, as such, highly impractical to say the least.  Some years later, reading my first bit of Guevara would undo all of that line of thinking.

Anthem stuck with me as an outstanding work for some time.  I remember telling other people about the magnificence of the book and even returning to the text to look for quotes and information at different points.  Politics weren't so important at the time because, as I noted above, my political beliefs and opinions had already been shaped for me by eight years of Reagan (plus a few years of George HW Bush as well).  But despite my favorable opinion of Anthem, I didn't bother to delve much farther into Rand after reading the book.  I worked at a library for several years and books by and about Ayn Rand passed through my hands with fleeting interest.  I especially remember the day we received a new book featuring a critique of Rand's life and work.  The cover was orange and it featured a picture of Rand wearing a huge brooch in the shape of a dollar sign.  The contents described Rand as a champion of capitalism which was new information to me (maybe I should have paid more attention in my literature class).  I was just starting to become interested in politics by that point and I was beginning to put some pieces together.  I was drawn to the liberal end of the political spectrum by the start of my undergraduate years and I began to look at Rand with some skepticism.  I was still interested, though.  It would be a while before I read much on Objectivism and Randian thought , but basic tenets such as Rand's emphasis on logic and reason and her rejection of metaphysics and religion seemed largely agreeable to me.  Over the years I read a little more by Rand, including a collection called The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction.  Thomai bought a super-deluxe edition of Atlas Shrugged as a gift for me one Christmas, but I am sorry to say that to date I have not succeeded in putting so much as a dent in it.

album coverSo what about music?  I started my high school years listening to The Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival.  By the time I started college, I had moved on to The Misfits and Sex Pistols. But certain tastes, like Kiss and Rush remained constant throughout these years.  I think my interest in Rush picked up considerable around my junior year in high school after I rented a VHS copy of "Exit…Stage Left."  I made a copy of the video, adding it an eclectic VHS mix tape that included the videos "Five from the Firm" and the Exodus/Slayer/Venom show "Ultimate Revenge" (I still love Venom!...You just can't outgrow some things no matter how crazy they are!)  Anyway, seeing the Rush concert video motivated me to pick up some of the studio albums that had featured songs from the live show.  "A Farewell to Kings" and "Permanent Waves" included some of my favorites like "Closer to the Heart," "Xanadu" and "Spirit of Radio." "The Trees" was also featured on "Exit...Stage Left" and I really enjoyed the song with all its drama and imagery, although I found the message behind the lyrics to be somewhat perplexing.  I would later come to learn that "The Trees"  as well as "Closer to the Heart" were credited as featuring "Randian themes" by some.  Towards the end of high school, I picked up a copy of "Signals."   I remember seeing television commercials for "Signals" when it was first released back in 1982.  I was 9 years old back then and I thought the dog and fire hydrant scene on the cover was funny.  Almost 10 years later, I was able to appreciate the album it at another level.

Rush stuck with me (or maybe I should say that I stuck with Rush) as I entered college.  By this point, I had become interested in a lot of competing genres and styles and I think it was around this time that I started listening to music in cycles.  By the time "Roll the Bones" had come out, I had been away from Rush for a while.  I bought a second-hand copy on cassette one night during one night during one of the "long, lonely summers" before I met Thomai.  This was one of the summers before we had started to date, and it was a period in which I was very uncertain of what I was going to do and where I would go in life.  I still remember the night rather well.  I remember walking to the car and putting the tape in the car's tape deck.  It was kind of late and I was alone.  I remember driving down what seemed like a very dark road listening to "Dreamline," the opening track from the album.  I couldn't help but identify with the lyrics as song poured out of the speakers and filled the air around me:

When we are young
Wandering the face of the earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that we're only immortal —
For a limited time

To be continued.