"Atlas Shrugged" as a Spark

Note: this post is actually an old one. It was written in Summer 2006. It was written when I discovered Ayn Rand. The following is the modified version. I had decided to rewrite a few parts for clarity.

Reading "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand has caused me to think. Think a lot, think a lot more about things I've stopped thinking about, or didn't think much, things I should be thinking, things I was wrongly positioned on.

In some ways, it's scary, in some ways, it's awesome. It's as if my current view lies somewhere in between, and my mind keeps jumping between two states unable to find a stable position, but I feel the distance between jumps is narrowing down to some certain point. I don't feel it yet, but I know it will come, as I parse through the book.

Reading "Atlas Shrugged" isn't reading, but looking through numerous points of views, logical chains of thoughts, ideas, philosophies, description of problems and their solutions. I'm reading it very differently, as I've never read a book before. It's not the plot that I'm after - I don't care what and how the plot will turn out and I feel no need to jump back and forth through pages. What I'm trying to grasp are the thoughts in the book. It's what's called between lines, but also something much deeper, it's not the lines, but maybe the entire page or a chapter that I look in-between.

What's really scary though is the change that it brings into my mind. And what makes it worse is the rate of that change compared to the usual flow. The change brought upon by the book is huge. It tears through many old and establish ideas, approaches, and my views on life.

But the change doesn't come from the book itself, or even the ideas discussed in the book. I bring the changes myself, by thinking about what I've read, what I think, how I thought or used to, and how it applies to something. So, in reality I am the one tearing down all that I hold wrong or inconsistent, or just plain bogus.

What it feels like is finding something that you've always had but never noticed, or ignored, or denied to have it. And now that it is found, it explodes without barriers. Not calmly and orderly, but explodes all around the mind, causing chains reactions in other thoughts, topics, views, assertions - anything and everything.

Some reviews have called the book dangerous, and it is. But not in the way they call it, but in a difference context: it is dangerous to those who wish for everyone to be a non-thinking robot. The book gives the mind a chance to re-discover itself. It feels as finding or creating another layer of your own mind that you weren't aware of before and to find spots that were never consciously used.

All that is a very Good thing.


P.S. Enormous thanks goes to Ayn Rand, who wrote the book and created philosophy of Objectivism.