Yesterday my car had an appointment for grooming with the Service Station. Knowing how much time these beauty sessions take, I carried some old magazines along to give me company. The Service Station has a nice air conditioned waiting room for the car owners to relax while their beauties get scrubbed and shampooed. A large TV set was on and the news channel was showing the latest antics of...you know who. So I started thumbing through one of the magazines and got interested in an article which took me almost half a century back.
The article was on Ayn Rand- remember the 700 page 'The Fountainhead' and a 1000 page 'Atlas Shrugged'? Some already known and some yet unknown facts and anecdotes made that article an interesting reading. I re-learnt that this proponent of, what came to be called 'Laissez-faire capitalism', was a Russian born in St. Petersburg who later migrated to the USA. What I did not know was that 'Ayn' in her name is pronounced as 'Ien' as in, say 'dine'.
But the most spicy and bizarre anecdote in the article informs us about her meeting, when she was 45, a bright young person of 19 and how the two became very close intellectually. But wait, the spicy part follows. At 50 she and her young friend ' received their partners' permission to meet for sex twice a week'. One wonders if this arrangement helped or hindered Ayn's flow of writing.
But it surely is an interesting thought to stop at!
(Article referred to is "Back in Business" by Andrea Sachs, Time, October 26, 2009.)
Chat, how many times has your physician advised you to lay off the 'spice'??!!!!!
ReplyDeleteOn second thoughts... you should take your car for a scrub more often ;-)