Janus Shellgame:
Do you remember when you were a child and all the world was new? Do you recall when everything was an adventure -- each experience, each new sight, each breath you took? Was not all about you fascinating? Can you think back to the time when you thought anything could be accomplished and the only limitations on your person were those set by your own mind?
Every child is an Objectivist.
"Give me a lever long enough, and I will move the world." That lever is Man's objective mind and its infinite capabilities.
Then do you remember faith replacing reason and doubt clouding the clear, intense view you had of objective reality? For a child's mind must be objective first, to be able to learn how to conceptualize.
Can you reconstruct the arrival of the cold, creeping fog of the irrational, moving inexorably towards you like a wraith that ever so slowly invaded your mind? A wispy tendril here, a deadened dream or expectation there?
Then, like some obscene smotherer intent on cowardly murder with the darkest reaches of your psyche, from the corner of some unseeable, unfathomable darkness, nonobjectivity approaches. Like some vampire of legend, the stifling, shapeless mass slithers forward to snuff out the spark of reason and leave in its wake the muffled whimpers of a dying mind and the faint reverberations of the distant echoes of clacking parrot beaks.
Father Terrence |
