We The Living

Have you ever been scared to open a book? Not because of what you might find between the pages, but rather because of what you might find out about yourself as you read it?

That is exactly how I felt about Ayn Rand's We The Living. My tattered second hand copy stood ignored on my bookshelf for years - the lettering on its cover shedding sadly and its pages yellowing. Each time I finished a novel and went about the task of picking my next read, my fingers would brush over its spine lovingly, but unhesitating, as they passed it by before plucking a different book from the shelf. Each time we relocated, the contents of my bookshelf would be bundled into boxes and carted off to the next house, where I would then perform a de-cluttering ritual whilst unpacking. The books that I had already finished or didn't particularly feel like reading were then placed in a pile, fated to be put back in a box and moved to the garage. There they would wait patiently (alongside the other five book boxes that hadn't made the shelf the last time around) for the rainy day I would feel the urge to re-read them.

During that sorting process my hand would waver, not for the first time unsure, above the two piles I had created. We The Living - storage or shelf? It was unread which meant shelf, but on the other hand a gut-wrenching sense of intellectual inadequacy overcame me whenever I thought about actually reading it. I had been faced with this dilemma before and as always I came to the same contradictory decision. We The Living was put down, adding to the pile on my left. I wasn't ready to read it - but I couldn't bring myself to put it away. Hope had surged through me once again - maybe this would be the year. And so it stood on my bookshelf once again, its already stained pages darkening and its edges curling tiredly. Why was I so conflicted, you ask? What was so special about this book? Well, if I am being entirely honest, it was because from what I had heard, Ayn Rand's philosophies and ideals were woven into her stories, her messages hung heavily from every word - giving each sentence a meaning to be discovered and cherished. Making each instance of vivid imagery a puzzle to be deciphered. She wrote about things that mattered - politics, the meaning of life, the meaning of work, love and the human spirit. She wrote about things that I couldn't possibly understand, and she wrote about them in such a way that their magic would only reveal itself to someone who did.

So, I put it off. How could I even attempt to understand Rand's philosophies when I hadn't even formulated my own? I had ideals of course and fundamental gut-feelings about all the important things - but I had absolutely no idea how to describe them, let alone defend them. I wanted so badly to be a great thinker and I hungered to know myself well enough to declare what I stood for but I was held back by the same little voice that taunted me whenever I picked up We The Living. "You won't understand little girl. It will be lost on you. Wasted. You won't even look within yourself because you are too afraid to find out that there isn't much there."

The first time that I defied that voice, was when I picked philosophy as one of my university subjects. The second time, was when I chose to major in it. Many people scoff at those who choose to study philosophy, calling it a "filler subject" or demanding a black and white answer to the question, "What will you do with it?" After three years, thousands of academic articles, millions of questions and an introduction to topics like Critical Social Theory, Phenomenology and Existentialism, the Metaphysics of Race, the Philosophy of Logic, Religion and Morality, I finally had an answer to that. We philosophers, were going to save the world. And so I came away from those Philosophy modules having gained one practical and extremely underrated skill - one that is fundamentally necessary in every profession, industry, faction, government and individual decision. I had the ability to critically analyse.

With this newfound superpower the world was opened to me. I questioned everything and for the first time in my life felt I could grasp the answers I found. I developed opinions, beliefs and found my moral compass. I started to see the human race differently, and the intricacies and contradictions of human experience shattered any peace I might have had, but this also allowed me to see all the wonderful, everyday miracles more clearly. Then COVID-19 struck and I was forced into isolation, trapped inside with my thoughts. As you can imagine, the combination of cabin fever and global disaster was all that was needed to push these thoughts about the meaning of existence in a pretty dark direction. I began staring into the abyss that is human suffering and wondering how the good in the world could make up for the bad. I had no answers. I needed a distraction - something to get me out of my own head for a while. I began frantically cleaning, soothed by the physical exertion, the repetitive action and the feeling of having a specific purpose. Make clean. Wash, hang, dry. Sweep, scrub, shine. I was about halfway through re-organizing my clothes cupboard when the tattered edge of a book caught my eye. We The Living, having been dragged around the country, was peaking out at me from a discarded suitcase. Yes, finally! I was ready. It was time.

It only took me a day to devour the novel. From cover to cover I marveled at the crystalline imagery, the surprising metaphors that used contrast and comparison in such arbitrary yet obvious forms and the heartbreaking humanism of the characters. I was completely captivated by the plot - an entanglement of realism and romance, framing its characters with poverty and pride and breaking the bounds of right and wrong with friendship that transcended ideology. As I looked at life through the eyes of Kira Argounova, a fierce young Russian woman living in post-revolutionary Russia, I started to see a connection between the internal struggles I had been facing and the way Rand en-captured so much human contradiction in her writing. Through Kira's interaction with the world and the people in it, who were all in some part good and bad, I began to learn something about my world.

It suddenly seemed apparent to me that our narrative as humans hasn't changed all that much throughout history. Some people suffer and others don't. Some are lucky and some are not. Some keep their dignity and some can't afford to. Some learn to accept life in all its tumultuous glory - the pain and the pleasure - while others cannot and fight for a control that they will never have. It all seemed very unfair to me. Much like my take on the suffering and successes of the 21st century. Elon Musk is a few short years away from Mars but there are still more than ten thousand children dying of starvation each day. We can print 3D tissues and organs but there are more than forty wars being fought around the world. Corrupt government officials live in luxury whilst innocent children are raped and murdered. Contradictory and unfair. If no solution had been stumbled upon by now, nearly eighty-four years after the first publication of Ayn Rand's novel dealing with the same issues, was there any point in trying to find one? Any point in trying to understand how there can be so much good and evil sharing an atmosphere? Rand was speaking directly to my demons and I wasn't sure what to think of it all. Until I got to page 196.

Suddenly, I was a fly on the wall in a commune in Russia, post-communist revolution, watching as Kira Argounova scrubs at her apron in the dead of night, careful not to wake her love, who she would never allow to see her so angry, sad and defeated. She cannot remove the stain, no matter how hard she scrubs. Her fingers are raw and her skin is stinging from the cold. She sits in the darkness and scours relentlessly, her eyes glinting like a woman possessed. It's almost as if the stain she is trying to remove is in fact the stain on her nation, or the stains on the souls of her suffering people, hers included - but not acknowledged - as in an attempt to save her spirit, she cleans away.

Kira had something inside of her that would not give in to the hopelessness of her situation. Her spirit - the driving force of the novel's plot - was hers alone and hers to fight for, even when everything seemed futile. I think what Kira taught me, especially towards the end of the novel, was that there is something even more prominent throughout history, than human suffering, and that thing is hope. No matter what you are forced to endure, as long as you are alive, there are so many possibilities. And in the words of Kira herself, "Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity - did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.". Now that to me is a testament to our own infinite capacity for good, for change, for growth and confirms the existence of an unbreakable human spirit, thriving in a fragile world.

By Georgia Rae