Ayn Rand: Pulp in My Laundry

Years ago when I started college Ayn Rand was in the air, like the ever-present lingering incense from dorm rooms up and down the hall.

So because I was like all the other self-conscious rebels, I started reading one of her novels. I got pretty far into it, then, with it in my backpack, had occasion to hitch somewhere (back in the day when hitching was a thing).

I stood on the side of the road, flashing my thumb for each passing car. It was hot, dry, like a desert day, and as each car passed I felt as if I was slowly desiccating. At one point I squatted, imagining myself like Tom Joad trying to go home, and thought about the novel. I began to feel more and more hollow, more and more empty, like a dry bone with the marrow long gone and the hot, dry air inexorably drifting through it.

And I had the feeling that I could give in to the emptiness, my soul evaporating into the nothingness.

And I knew I would be lost

And I almost didn't care.

Then a driver picked me up. He was a friendly fellow. I remember he had a big smile. He laughed like a man who liked to laugh. We engaged in small talk as we drove on, and the desert moment passed.

A couple of months  later, I was living in a big city, having taken a leave of absence from college. I was working in a group home, and becoming involved with a girl and her older sister and all their friends. Ayn Rand was floating about there too, lingering in the air like the stale cigarette smoke my big-city acquaintances exhaled as they proclaimed their collective uniqueness.

In my loneliness I tried to be unique too.

I had finished the first Rand novel, and, at the urging of my girlfriend, I began a second. I got part way through it, then, one day, threw in into a bag of laundry I was taking to the group home where I worked, thinking I would read more of it at lunch. In a hurry, I dumped my laundry into the washer, then ran off to do some things with the home's residents.

Later, I opened the washer.

The paperback novel had been reduced to pulp, shreds of it scattered throughout all my clothes.

I had to take the clothes out, item by item, pick out all the pieces of the novel, and rewash the clothes. I still found shreds of the novel in my underwear and socks weeks later.

Feathers in the wind.

A nascent poet, I saw a metaphor in this. And I took it as a sign from God.

I stopped reading Rand uncritically.

I read Tolkien and Lewis and Chesterton instead.

I still read them.

Which explains so much..

Pax et bonum