The Lesson of the Viking

"The only hero [Kira] had known was a Viking whose story she had read as a child; a Viking whose eyes never looked farther than the point of his sword, but there was no boundary for the point of his sword; a Viking who walked through life, breaking barriers and reaping victories, who walked through ruins while the sun made a crown over his head, but he walked, light and straight, without noticing its weight; a Viking who laughed at kings, who laughed at priests, who looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook and there, over-shadowing the sky, he saw his own picture; a Viking who lived but for the joy and the wonder and the glory of the god that was himself."
-We The Living p. 49

One can see the ideals of Ayn Rand embodied in this story. It's about living, about being and not getting caught up in the details and drudgery of life. It's easy to see the destruction that the Viking normally is thought of as bringing, but Rand finds away of finding the beauty in it as well. It's the beauty yet rugged nature of the Viking. The Viking is only concerned with himself--which is the individual value that Rand is known for. In a simplistic form the Viking embodies the hero that she came to fully write about in works such as Atlas Shrugged.


So what is the lesson that the Viking brings?

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand is an author who has personally fascinated me since high school. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At nine years old she started her writing career. She admired Victor Hugo and saw herself, like him, a European writer, not a collectivist Russian writer. In high school she witnessed the Kerensky Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. She escaped the fighting by moving with her family to Crimea. With the victory of the Communist brought hard times around for her family. In her last year of high school she studied American history which became her model of what free men could be. 

She attended the University of Petrograd where she studied philosophy and history. She graduated in 1924 and found that the communists had infiltrated life once again. She found comfort in Viennese operettas and Western films. In 1925 she was granted permission to travel to America which was suppose to be short, though she was determined never to return to Soviet Russia. 

While in America she moved to Hollywood to try her hand at screenwriting. After working various jobs in Hollywood on sets. Her first book We The Living was completed in 1934 but was rejected by several publishers, but eventually was published in 1936. This was the most autobiographical of all her novels, being based on her years under Soviet tyranny.  

She published many other famous work such as the Fountainhead, Anthem and Atlas Shrugged. She often depicted a hero as being the "ideal man" or how a man "could be and ought to be." Her philosophy developed and came into full bloom in Atlas Shrugged which integrated: ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. Her philosophy became known as Objectivism a "philosophy for living on earth." 

Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982. Her books are still widely known and thousands of copies are sold a year. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.

Life and Death

"Don't be afraid of death Winnie, be afraid of the unlived life."

What's ideal: quantity or qualitity? Obviously one wishes to have both-but which would you choose, if you had to. Berry wrestles with this very question and the story of Lily in his essay Quanity vs. Form.

Is death something that should be avoided and be put off at all costs or is it the completion of a life?

Where do we meet in the middle? It is one thing to bring death upon oneself, and another entirely to not wish to allow science to extend one's life until it's nothing more than machinery moving one's breath in and out. This is a very touchy subject that has intrigued me personally for some time; yet it's still all very new territory. Ethics has long been forgotten in this pursuit of immortality, but it's time for a change. It is time to understand balance. To allow for autonomy to decide where the balance between quanity and quality lies.

Stories

What ever happened to the days when life was slower, simpler, and maybe even sweeter? You know the days that Hollywood has often romantacized, when most people lived off the land. The days of "family, forestry and pulling horses."

But is what I just described really the truth?
Is the reality that is often times romantacized truly a result of reality or is it "reality drawn from fiction?" As Berry was once told, "there's no use in telling a pretty good story when you can tell a really good story?" Some may gasp at reading this statement, but is it not the truth? Think of the fish tales in one's own life-how many times has our fish grown, maybe by just a couple of inches, or by several feet? One might yell "Lies! All lies!" but by telling the really good story, doesn't one still learn something? The storyteller aknowledges human limits and a human power and the listerner(s) hear a more telling/moving/inspiring [insert other appropriate synonym here].

Berry admits that many of his own stories start from a real event, but then evolve into a great story that in the end can only be labeled as fiction. If we get so tied down in the facts and researching what really happened don't we miss the point of it all. It's like looking at a painting and only focusing on how this line could be clearer, that smudge should really be a shade darker and missing the beauty of the painting that is staring you in the face-the wonder of it all.

I'm not saying ignore the truth, but allow yourself to listen to the story.

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, born August 5, 1934 in Henry Couty, Kentucky. This man is an American "man of letters, acadmenic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is the author of novels, short stories, poems and essays.

Berry earned his bachelor's degree from the Univeristy of Kentucky in 1956 and finished his master's in 1957. He has taught at many prestigious univeristies such as, Stanford, Georgetown, New York University and Bucknell.

He has published over forty works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. These publications have earned him several awards and honors from the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to the T.S. Eliot Award and many, many more.

He currently lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky.

Another Blog-"In Search of Sunlight"

While reading the Shantung Compound and searching for articles that I felt tied into the book, I stumbled upon this little gem:
http://kindlingforhim.blogspot.com/2008/11/shantung-compound-summaries.html

If you haven't read this book, this blogger gives a great summary of the main points discussed in Shantung Compound. Also I would highly suggest this book to anyone, no matter where you are in life, there is something you can take from the simple, yet complex truths that Gilkey writes about.

Rolling Blackouts and Pressure

Fort Worth Rolling Blackouts

Thanks to all the snow, or to be more accurate—the ice, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) mandated “rolling power outages.” This was a last resort and ERCOT claims that controlled outages are good and should last no longer than thirty minutes.

Well that’s all pretty boring information, and the article attached is as well. So why did I post this article? I posted it in response to all the facebook statuses I read in relation to the blackouts.

In the age of information we are all pumped full of more information than we know what to do with (just look at how beautifully the Bing commercials have captured this concept).

For the amount of information readily available at the click of a button I was appaled by the ignorance of many of the posts that I read.

This got me thinking about the Shantung Compound and how my generation would act if put “under pressure.” Sure one could argue that in this day and age that we do live under all sorts of stress or pressure. Our generation lives under the pressure of a failing economy, unstable weather, a lack of jobs, the list goes on and on for each individual.

The question still remains of how does the pressure we in the modern world face stack up against that of those in the Shantung Compound Internment Camp?

I feel that we act quite the same as those in the book—we go about our daily lives, and occasionally we recognize the situation we are dealing with, but just as quickly we turn and go back to our normal conversations and daily activities. That is unless there is a spectacle to be made, much like the trial depicted in the Shantung Compound. It captures our full attention--Michael Vick is torturing animals, Genocide is happening in Darfur--*gasp* but these things only hold our attention for a brief moment. The cruelty and injustice in the world soon goes back under the radar and continues on.

So shouldn’t our generation be different?

We have the ability to obtain information, to google the rolling blackouts and understand their necessity. We do live in the “Age of Information.” So why do we choose to be ignorant, as facebook so often points out through our friends and maybe sometimes even our own statuses? The people in Shantung Compound didn’t have google, or plasma screen 48’ T.V.s or let alone a newspaper to gain information from—ignorance was their only option. It’s not our only option. So I leave with one last question:

Will ignorance always be bliss?