ramblings and rumblings of a college student.

A rebirth of thought is something that we all need to go through, right? I'm not so sure it's a natural thing, though--is it rather something we consciously decide? Never in my life have I simply gone through such, and it's folly to think I could without effort. What's the point? Honestly, I'm happy with what I am and what I am not, for better or worse. I'm not a serial killer, I'm not a compulsive liar, I'm not in love with the notion of myself. I am, on the other hand, somewhat educated, inspired, and in love with ideas (the execution of said ideas, on the other hand, is lacking.)

I am what I am.

Right?

"To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words."

"I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"

--from Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

Just weakness and cowardice. It's so easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on ones own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for compitence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men...If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others...I'd give my life to save you. Not because its any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.

But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act--the process of reason-- must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of the body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.

-The Fountainhead--Ayn Rand

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

There is no honest revolt against reason-- and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter haw much you give to charity or haw many prayers you recite--that if you sleep with sluts, you're not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love your wife next morning--that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through the universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to anything, the universe of a child's nightmare where identities switch and swim, where the ratter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will--that you are a man- that you are an entity-- that you are..

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand