One last peek at an unforgettable verbal trainwreck
KeithHandy posted in Funny ha-ha, Your Soul on April 8th, 2007
Before I give my old copy of Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto a better future than it deserves — in the “free books” pile rather than the wastebasket — I just wanted to take a final morbid glance at this… um… well, just read it.
The products of America’s anti-rational, anti-cognitive “Progressive” education, the hippies, are reverting to the music and the drumbeat of the jungle.
[…]
A brief word about so-called modern music: no further research or scientific discoveries are required to know with full, objective certainty that it is not music. The proof lies in the fact that music is the product of periodic vibrations — and, therfore, the introduction of nonperiodic vibrations (such as the sounds of street traffic or of machine gears or of coughs and sneezes), i.e., of noise, into an allegedly musical composition eliminates it automatically from the realm of art and of consideration.
[…]
“Because I felt like it” is not a definition or validation of anything.
There is no place for whim in any human activity — if it is to be regarded as human. There is no place for the unknowable, the unintelligible, the undefinable, the non-objective in any human product. This side of an insane asylum, the actions of a human being are motivated by a conscious purpose; when they are not, they are of no interest to anyone outside a psychotherapist’s office. And when the practitioners of modern art declare that they don’t know what they are doing or what makes them do it, we should take their word for it and give them no further consideration.
- Art and Cognition, 1971
Thank you, Aynny-baby. Not just for hammering that final nail into the coffin of my embarrassing Rand phase… but had you not spoken out so courageously, we’d all be listening to gears and coughs right now.
*cough*
…
… hey, that was kinda catchy. I think I’ll call it “Symphony for a Rational Industrialist“.
