literary fiction Archives - American Wordsmith

On the Current Cultural Decay

Today’s cultural climate is full of desensitized and inefficacious people who assume that things just “happen” to them. People who are inefficacious disgust me. I have always sympathized with the truly great Men who take action. I love Men who fight against those who try to stop their innovation. They have efficacy and, therefore, my undying respect.

I can still remember, having been raised Protestant, seeing men, specifically, in church kneeling and I cringed, even as a child. I thought, “How lowly and weak they look!” Fast-forward to college and another late night reading session for tomorrow’s class where I have the works of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Marlowe’s version of Faust in my hands, further empathizing with the devil and the snake and Man who desires knowledge.

My sense of life became clearer to me when I felt this ferocity rise within at Man who is refused the ability to know and refused to feel proud of knowing. After all, our tool of survival is our mind, our reason! Why must Christianity squash the very thing that makes us capable of living? I find it pure evil.

Perhaps this moment of fierce rebellion in my soul, sitting in my college’s library, is why I always seem to come back to motifs of snakes and birds, heaven and hell, God and Satan, and Adam and Eve in my work. I cannot help but rage against those who tell me not to know when I have spent all my life trying to know everything! I’ve always said that if I could have a chip inserted into my brain with all human knowledge known today, then I would.

My fear is that we can go backwards as a society. Literary fiction and other art dies in a bad or sick culture. Today, all literary fiction is tribalistic and not about morality at all. The Left has thrown morality away since they believe it is incurably tied to religion, while the Right has kept to their small Christian publishing presses to put out more of the same religious morality texts. But where, oh where!, are the secular moralists who are capable of shining through the rubbish? Where are the writers and readers who want to learn how to be better and happier living their ever-longer lives on earth?!

Why are publishers saying no to any books that are not liberal or tribalistic in nature? Why is there outrage over “literary fiction” books even existing anymore? Because our culture is dying.

I can blame liberal ideology and religious ideology to a certain extent, but beyond that I am unsure. All I know is that the worst thing an individual can do is desensitize themselves to life. And, yet, drugs, drinking, hedonism in general, even rushing from one loud event to the next or traveling all over the world without one moment to rest are causing a group of desensitized people to roam around the earth and teach their children the same. When the music dies down and the party leaves, people can no longer stand being with their own thoughts and so they repeat the numbing process over and over again in one endless cycle.

I remember when I was presenting my literary thesis to my professors in undergrad. When I finished, one commented about how they thought it was a theatrical performance because of the way I read it and openly mocked me when I said that the meaning of life was about happiness. My professors were a product, in the most extreme way, of a culture that is dying, if not already dead. They were cynical, could not take their own subject seriously, and believe that “Truth” is outside of reality. My rebellious heart raged that day, and I will never forget it. Yet, again, here is the Left telling me that I cannot know anything, just as much as the religious Right does.

Well, I refuse to believe that I cannot know how to be happy or that it is not a worthy goal. And I would rather feel too much anxiety about every little thing in my life than nothing at all. I would rather feel deep gratitude for what appear to most as “boring” or “inane” things; I would rather feel endless sorrow for a loss in my life than to drown them in drink; I would rather behave as innocently as a child, than as cynically as a manic-depressive professor. Life becomes more bearable when you know madness does not arise “out of the blue” but is built up by hundreds of little acts of transgression over time that you and the others around you never cared to notice. Being in a desensitized state is a killer to human beings; don’t let it get you next.

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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.

On Writing and Why I Chose Literary Fiction

As far as my opinions on writing go and the way I write, I have a few tips, though I am still young and things may come into sharper focus as I age.

Ever since childhood, I have used my “microscope” to help me find the words to say. I can look at something that others would pass right over and by noticing what makes it special, then the words and ideas come. It sort of is like a meditative process. One word of warning though if you become “stuck” in this writer’s perspective, then going to overly stimulating places (which, unfortunately, so very many people are fond of today) may cause great anxiety. I cannot seem to come out of this mindset or attention to detail, so I tend to feel the need to prepare myself before attending anything loud or overcrowded (medication helps too).

By staying with these “moments,” there is in the nature of them a sense of urgency, so holding onto them with words is akin to catching them in a net. The best way to access these special moments is by becoming a soldier of the arts. You should get up and follow a routine every day that allows your mind to focus on the unique bits and bobs that stray from the norm. They become more obvious to you when you are not rushing around your house looking for the house keys before running out the door for work.

My sense of gratitude and happiness comes from the effort that goes into working with a purpose—not from sunshine and rainbows. I never aim to suffer, but I surely am willing to give it my full effort to achieve my goal that promises more of a long-lasting feeling of contentment and pure bliss.

In terms of more specific writing tips, I would say to never introduce too many characters early on (like Dickens). It becomes “crow-blowing” (unlike in Les Misérables when one character is described for many pages). Only when the readers grasp the present character can they then move on to understanding another.

I also believe that it is a corrupt idea to say that fiction does not mirror reality, but instead creates a “new reality.” Literary fiction is only meant to show how reality (singular) ought to be and what it truly means to be human. There is no “other” reality being created.

Also, in scattershot form: always give details to bring the reader closer to the perspective/experience/character; never become too focused on the environment/social over the individual; main characters without values are not worth writing about because they are unrealistic; always remember that the universe is benevolent!

To be a great writer, one must observe the world, study it, and then integrate to produce a creative product.

I love writing stories because I can walk through a moral problem that I am having from a rational (not spiritual) perspective and come to a conclusion that is satisfactory. That is why I find that outlines never really helped me because I had to work from a single scene in a logical progression until, due to contextual circumstances, I could only come to a single conclusion and that becomes my ending. Personally, it makes a book more enjoyable to write when you are unsure what the main answer is.

Although, I would say that ideas have come to me in many ways for the books I have written so far: sometimes it’s a single scene or vignette floating around in my head for a while, or the first sentence, or the last, or even just an environment that embodies an entire idea. If the idea is strong enough, then I find that I do not even need to write it down as other ideas for the next piece just keep building on themselves in my mind.

Ultimately, my desire is to bring the body back into literature—bring Man back into literature. My novels range from exploring the worst evils to the highest good done by Man. However, the naturalist movement of the late nineteenth century ripped the story away from the romanticized individual and onto the piece of land being sown with seed. Well, I would like to be remembered as the writer who analyzed a few moral topics within the philosophical branch of ethics that is set down in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. My goal in life is to teach people about secular morality by pointing to a time in history, such as mid-nineteenth century America, when I believe the culture was better. Literary fiction should teach and make Man better.

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Literary Critique of Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Part I)

I picked up and put down Normal People by Sally Rooney multiple times as I came across it in my everyday life—at the bookstore, at the library, online. I had heard that she was a Marxist, and I could only roll my eyes and vow to never read her book.

But a few years after its first publication, I saw her top all the literary fiction lists and lauded as the voice of the millennial generation. I could hardly ignore someone who received such ravings and applause from what seemed like several thousands of fans. So, I borrowed the book from my local library and spent a weekend reading.

The following article will need to be in two parts: the first part concerning Rooney’s writing style and the second part concerning the story itself.

The very first thing to pop out at me was the use of dates for chapter headings. It begins with “January 2011” right on page 1. The readers now know that this text is time-sensitive and not evergreen like all good literary fiction should be. Please note that when I critique these style choices and techniques, it is not just found in this book but in most of the modern books of today, be they genre or literary fiction. Exact dates and times, like those found on all of our digital paper trails nowadays, erase the concept of reading a piece in any time period.

This brings me to another important point: I do not believe that Man and the values he requires to survive have changed. His emotions have not changed. That is why we can read ancient texts, like those of Plato and Aristotle, and still gain wisdom from them. They are not static pieces of text, which make no sense to us today. So, writing can be everlastingly relevant, and literary fiction, a form of fiction that teaches us what it means to be human, should be sensitive to such notions.

The next striking decision made by the author is that there are no quotation marks used at all in the book. The whole point of grammar is to make the reader stay with the story. It is the hidden mechanics of a piece well-written. Therefore, quotation marks are necessary to avoid confusion and pull the reader out of the story.

A single printing press traveled overseas from England to Massachusetts in 1638 and another arose in 1685. These presses printed mostly religious texts for their local communities. Colonial America began to publish more news-based books in 1728 when Benjamin Franklin began his own printing press. Since those early days of publishing, books were an enjoyable pastime for many a family.

But since the creation of the publishing industry, the roots were planted for today’s “Big Four” (Penguin Random House (1927), Macmillan (1843), Hachette Book Group (1826), and HarperCollins (1817)). By the end of the nineteenth century, the companies began publishing the likes of William James (1842-1910), James Joyce (1882-1941), William Faulkner (1897-1962), and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). All these writers, and many others, used James’s idea in psychology of “stream of consciousness” writing, where I believe grammar was first butchered and thrown to the wayside in favor of primal emotions cast upon the page. The authors took this theory to mean that our minds do not form complete sentences and that incomplete phrases are best for expressing our true inner experiences. Forget the structure of language and the reasons for its construction, these writers shout.

Though Sally Rooney and most modern writers do not go as far with the nonsensical writing as Joyce did, it is still common to see sentence fragments used for emphasis, much like in Hemingway’s writing. Ernest Hemingway used a mixture of sentence fragments and short telegraphic sentences. Rooney is similarly described for her “perfectly spare prose” (Goodreads blurb) in which this technique is still used. However, this type of prose used throughout a book strips it of its intended emphatic impact and renders the impact of the text overall immature.

Therefore, alongside this “modern” choice of skipping the quotation marks is also the author’s decision to slip in sentence fragments, like using “Yesterday” (2) to emphasize her points. Unfortunately, many more modern writers have bent the grammar rules like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joyce. Perhaps poets more than novelists can get away with such playful uses of language, but for a story that is trying to delve into a serious study of character, I find that it, again, pulls the reader out of the story.

Another massively annoying technique used by every modern author I’ve read is the use of name-dropping. Brand names are tossed left and right, which to a modern audience may be understood, but in a decade will be lost on the readers. Rooney will require several footnotes at the end of her book for things like “Facebook” (4, 82, 170, 192 x2, 212, 232 x3), “MacBook” (21, 70), “Destiny’s Child remix” (32), “Kanye West song […] with the Curtis Mayfield sample” (40), “Aldi” (47), “Watch the Throne (74), “Vampire Weekend” (86), “Twitter” (100), “Skype” (191, 192, 222), “Evian bottle” (197), “Microsoft computer” (121), “Coke” (160, 229 x2), “White Lies song” (234), “PlayStation” (266), etcetera. I am only a few years younger and even I had to look some of these references up. That’s why I believe it is a good idea, especially in literary fiction, to never drop brand names. I know writers wish to give more detail and I even remember my creative writing teacher asking the class, “What kind of apple is it? Is it a Gala apple or a Red Delicious?” But for a reader, all they want to know is if it was a red apple, or if it was sweet, or bruised, it does not require a name for them to understand the point you are making as a writer. You can describe things with the senses, not by their brand names.

I also feel uncomfortable reading about characters texting, emailing, and online chatting because oftentimes the writer, as Rooney does, keeps the messages in their “original” forms, which usually means sentences that begin with the lower case, shorten words to letters, and generally misuse all forms of the English language. A novel is not meant to be a photograph of real life; it is an art form. An author does not have to choose to put in text messages as they look in real life, just as epistolary novels probably did not add the obvious spelling mistakes or scratched out sections in real letters they received. Art is all about omitting and shifting around things in real life to make it better, showing Man how the world ought to be—not how it is.

Instead, Rooney chooses to show her readers what the world is as she sees it, in the words of Hobbes’s Leviathan, as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Rooney emphasizes such ugliness by using curse words in her text, such as, “The economy’s fucked anyway” (21). I find that unless no other word would be better suited to that character, curse words should never be used. Being vulgar in literary fiction is unnecessary, lowly, and a cheap way to show character. I feel the same way about using clichés. There are better ways to explain a scene than just throwing around garbage words and seeing what moves the reader only after having a fit.

My final critique of the style choices this author made is her trickling throughout the book of her liberal ideology. Of course, I believe that this is the key to what got her published in the first place.

Allow me to list every obvious moment of liberalism and virtue signaling allowed to carry on throughout this book:

“school as an oppressive environment.” (12)
“He told her she should try reading The Communist Manifesto, he thought she would like it” (13, about Marxism)
The Fire Next Time (14, about racism)
The Golden Notebook (27, about feminism)
“It’s something to do with capitalism, she said.

“Yeah. Everything is, that’s the problem, isn’t it? she nodded.” (36)

“The communist Declan Bree. Connell, unprovoked, continued watching the road. We could do with a bit more communism in this country if you ask me, he said. From the corner of his eye he could see Lorraine smiling. Come on now, comrade, she said. I was the one who raised you with your good socialist values, remember? It’s true Lorraine has values. She’s interested in Cuba, and the cause of Palestinian liberation. In the end Connell did vote for Declan Bree, who went on to be eliminated in the fifth count. Two of the seats went to Fine Gael and the other to Sinn Féin. Lorraine said it was a disgrace. Swapping one crowd of criminals for another, she said. He texted Marianne: fg in government, fucks sake. She texted back: The party of Franco. He had to look up what that meant.” (48-9)
“reusable plastic bag” (52, 114)
“Critical Theory seminar” (69)
“Jesus, don’t tell me he’s involved in this Nazi thing, is he?” (82)
“Holocaust denier”; “white moderates” (83)
James Connolly & The Irish Trades Union Congress (87, Socialist Marxists)
“I wanted to try an open-relationship thing. […] Men can be possessive, she says.” (98)
“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves, says Marianne. […] I mean, when you look at the lives men are really living, it’s sad, Marianne says. They control the whole social system and this is the best they can come up with for themselves? They’re not even having fun.” (99)
“Would you rather live under a matriarchy? says Peggy. […] Don’t you enjoy your male privilege? she says.

“It’s like Marianne was saying, he replies. It’s not that enjoyable to have. I mean, it is what it is, I don’t get much fun out of it.

“Peggy gives a toothy grin. If I were a man, she says, I would have as many as three girlfriends. If not more.” (99)

“Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct. […] I don’t buy into the morality of work, she says. Some work maybe, but you’re just moving paper around an office, you’re not contributing to the human effort.” (112)
“May the revolution be swift and brutal.” (125)
“fascist”; “chauvinist pig” (144)
“Peggy thinks men are disgusting animals with no impulse control […]” (144)
“That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.” (166)
“Magdalene Laundry report”; “Denis O’Brien case” (173)
“The whole idea of “meritocracy” or whatever, it’s evil, you know I think that.” (180)
“Recycling bin” (256)

Now, there were some other more minor points made concerning class division and Connell wearing “Argos chic” clothes (151) and being a “milk-drinking culchie” (154), but those do not slap readers across the face as the other quotes above do.

Many of these topics concern the Left’s tribalistic love affair with topics like racism, feminism, and Marxism. Sally Rooney openly declares herself to be a Marxist, and it seems like that opened the doors to her publishing career.

End of Part I

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Literary Critique of Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Part II)

Here is the back cover blurb for Sally Rooney’s book, Normal People:

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Normal People is the story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t.

Not only is the writing immature in certain ways, but the characters from the beginning are immature. I understand that someone reading this who is younger or older than her intended audience may think this portrayal of young adults is accurate, but I, (who am of that age range), found them extremely immature. They act more like teenagers and remain one-dimensional throughout. Take, for instance: “It occurred to Marianne how much she wanted to see him having sex with someone; it didn’t have to be her, it could be anybody” (12). Marianne lacks a self, a side to love. I believe this comes from her author’s devotion to Marxism, where sacrificing herself to other people is the only way she can feel much of anything. “She just let things happen, like nothing meant anything to her” (22). Marianne remains this passive, bleak, almost deterministic character throughout the book.

But Marianne is no better than Connell. Who cares so much about other people in high school that he only has sex with Marianne in secret? Marianne asks him: “Would you be embarrassed if they found out? she said. In some ways, yeah” (94). It just seems so childish for a person who is no longer a boy. In a similar Marxist fashion, Connell is also focused on Marianne’s class, as if being wealthy makes you a different species. Rooney writes: “If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced” (73). So, Connell is a chameleon. He is a person who just feeds off of others. [And might I add that he is not the only character who is like this, Rob is another. For “Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others” (219).]

I must say that I don’t believe Rooney’s attempts to just drop complaints about class and expect her readers to blindly shake their heads in agreement, just like she did with those Leftist book titles. I went to public school, and I had friends from all ends of the class spectrum, especially for a child who has no control over where or how they grow up, your “class” in America does not make you into something alien as this Marxist author is trying to imply. Who cares about your class or station or rank when you are in high school? Again, I find it childish.

Throughout the text, there is this confusion about sexuality, mainly concerning Marianne. Again, being the good little Marxist, she is open to open relationships, bisexuals, homosexuals, threesomes, whatever happens to her happens. Of course, she can never be happy when she does nothing to better herself or her situation! The whole beginning felt like an inferior version of The Breakfast Club. Why does adulthood seem synonymous with doing immoral things, as if losing your soul is cool? So, Marianne sleeps around and takes up smoking and looks anorexic and depressed all the time. Is that what it means to be an adult? She has conversations with Connell like, “I think I was starting to have feelings for you there at one point. […] You just have to repress all that stuff, Marianne, he said” (101). So not falling in love with anyone is cool? Both main characters made me cringe with their “look at me, I’m so adult” behavior. For example, Marianne discusses getting pregnant with “I like to upset people’s expectations” (105) as her justification for doing so. Anyone who does things just for other people is not ready for any kind of responsibility in this world. And look, I’ve gone through my teenage “scene phase,” but by high school, and especially college, I was ready to be a responsible adult, and I never felt like truly, passionately loving another human being was “uncool.”

The only “change” occurs in the middle of the book when Marianne and Connell’s social status reverses—now she’s considered “cool” and he’s not. But what actually changes in terms of their appraisal of themselves and how they feel? Nothing changes in the book; there is no character change. I’m not even sure it can be considered a complete book at all. Neither character realizes their immaturity, although they do manage to say “I love you” by the end. But is that considered a change when they become separated again by choice?

If anything, each character only becomes more depressed. I would blame their Marxist ideology on such emotional turmoil, but let’s look at some phrases each character uses first. They refer to themselves as “self-hating” (pg. 139); that “they had the same unnameable spiritual injury” (175); that “human life was pointless” (232); that “She hates the person she has become, without feeling any power to change anything about herself” (244); that they were “becoming unrecognizably debased” (245); that “deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong” (247); and yet, “No one can be independent of other people completely” (pg. 269). By the end, Marianne has let herself embrace becoming a sexual plaything, and Connell is so depressed that he wants to kill himself. Now, do these sound like well-adjusted young adults to you, dear reader?

I believe that this is a true vignette of what happens when young people try to erase their egos. They can no longer love passionately; they wallow in their own self-hatred. I implore anyone who has not yet read The Fountainhead to read it. This is real literary fiction where the character of Keating is shown in exactly the same way as Marianne and Connell—parasites. But Ayn Rand can explain Keating’s behaviors through philosophy, unlike Rooney, who gives you a sketch of two messed-up people. You can only grow to hate yourself or consider yourself a monster when your life does merely become a string attached to a web of other people. When you become other people, like a chameleon, then how can you act? To live on this earth with any agency, and, ultimately, any happiness, then you must uphold your ego.

The fact that people are praising Sally Rooney as some kind of voice for the millennial generation greatly disturbs me. Wake up, readers! It’s frightening that people are espousing how much Rooney is exposing their own feelings on the page. It means that those people are fighting against what makes them human on a daily basis.

The book would be better if she wrote about it as an anecdote of how not to behave, but instead, she loves her characters (as most writers do), and she wants them to represent how she sees the world. But it’s wrong and surprisingly immature for someone her age.

I am just a few years younger than her, and I learned that this kind of wallowing is for teenagers at most. But there should not be a kind of anger, bitterness, and frustration that should carry through into your 20s and 30s. If anything, this proves that millennials are less mature than the previous generation.

Yet, the publishing industry opened its arms wide to accept their new literary figurehead onto the scene, because nothing has changed there. Normal People seems to be about outcasts who are not really even outcasts. They are, in fact, cultural representatives of the Left, which is what the publishing industry comprises. Rooney’s characters are moochers, sucking off the teat of literary fiction’s prestige to feed their own lack of character.

Rooney paints characters who have no “self” in a world where sex is merely about power and manipulation and not something beautiful to be cherished. She destroys the ego, which is necessary for our survival. Yet, no one in her story has agency. Marianne unconditionally loves Connell, while he is afraid of dominance and of becoming a man. But, to me, being submissive is a gift that a woman gives to a man she truly values and trusts. It is the very expression of love for a woman, as dominance is for a man. But Rooney does not think monogamy or boyfriend/girlfriend dynamics truly exist. (Because you have to have a self and be confident enough to form such relationships). She hates “masculinity,” believes in “the patriarchy,” and that capitalism is a “coercive system.” The same old, same old ideology. She is just another liberal, checking off her list of things to drop in her story. Well, she does not speak for me, nor does the entire publishing industry. I refuse to recognize Sally Rooney as the great millennial writer who is a perfect representative of literary fiction.

End of Part II

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On the Reader

I grew up with sensitive parents who each dealt with their own set of mental health difficulties. While I felt their love and affection during my key years of development, by seven, divorce shook my family to its core, and by eleven, death had riven it asunder. I would never be the same again and I was forced early on into the philosophical conundrum of asking “why?” Why did my mother have to die so young? Why do I deserve this suffering? Why can’t my family get along? Why is life so difficult?

Books became my way of searching for the “why” to life. It was the only way I knew how to do research. My parents both read and wrote, and so I became familiar early on with the concept of reading and escaping and learning and knowing through the page. I learned that reading and writing were my strengths throughout school as well.

That is why surface-level stories have not interested me since elementary school, when every book on the shelf felt like a gift or a piece of candy. But today, especially with so much out there, I do not have time for stories that are simply meant to entertain—not that there is anything immoral about them. But I have always wanted to learn how to be happy. I have always read literature with a purpose in mind, which is why I take it so seriously. How do I find happiness? I took the good and bad stories as a guide for what I should and should not do in order to be happy. And to do that, I had to judge.

I have learned so much more about humanity through literary fiction than any therapy session or movie or lecture in school. By asking myself why does the character behave that way, I can have a dialogue with the writer through their story. I can walk in those proverbial shoes of another human being to discover new things about myself and my own life story.

So there has always been this fire in my belly to know—to read and then compare that created world of the authors to my personal experience. Nothing will get you further in life than being honest with yourself first and foremost, and that it what I love the most about my parents. For I think they were each brutally honest with themselves and the world they lived in. I learned to never stray from taking an honest look at myself, which is what a writer must be: brutally honest with themselves and the world they live in.

Therefore, I hope that it has become clearer to you why I do not feel I have the time to read “genre fiction” but only “literary fiction.” It is not because I am being snobbish; it is because I need answers to live. If I didn’t have access to all the classics I have read thus far, then I may have suffocated a long time ago. For, you see, as a child who had no control over my external circumstances, something had to be under my control and I needed to know that life would get better and that I could make it so.

My reading and searching and effort paid off when I found the philosophy for living a happy life on earth, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. It gave me the secular kind of morality that I was searching for and the control I craved to steer my newfound adult life into the light. She saved me from the gut-wrenching feeling I had whenever I left my humanities classes in high school but could never explain clearly. I was suffering from a public school system that rapidly became less about learning how this world works and more about how guilty I should feel for even breathing. The message of guilt only heightened in degree in college until I had to find more of a concrete link to Objectivism through the Ayn Rand Institute and all they had to offer.

High school and college life made me feel like that out-of-control child, where life was determined and I had to succumb to a fate where life was “nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes). I have felt existential dread before, but it was due to an entire educational system that, overall, refused to integrate. My supply of air was thinning out, and the anxiety beast inside of me rose up and fought to take over my life. After lots of therapy and medication and building up my adult life away from the school system, I am finally starting to feel like I am on stable ground again.

To me, good literature reveals truths about who we are as humans—from the best in us to the worst. In that sense, I agree with John Gardner who wrote On Moral Fiction. We need more moral fiction, not in the religious sense, but in the way that it can inspire and guide people toward virtue and against vice in order to attain happiness. Again, we have come to an age that no longer needs religion, but it most certainly still needs a moral code. Ayn Rand gave us a philosophical framework to live by such values but now, I believe, people need to see a barrage of examples of secular-based morality.

Sadly, people still believe that morality is inextricably linked to Judeo-Christian beliefs. But people must live according to the laws of reality or else they will die. And, again, going back to the Tolstoyan idea, there are essentially so many ways to die and only one way to live. Maybe that’s why reading books with tragic endings raises the hairs on our heads, because we are learning how to avoid death. At least, that is how seriously I take my reading and writing endeavors, and I hope you will too.

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