Quarter after midnight.
I’ve been writing elsewhere some notes on the Promethean gift of fire to humankind and the virtue of selfishness, according to Ayn Rand. I don’t know how efficient capitalism is as a system, so maybe I don’t agree wholly with her ideas; but I’m absolutely certain that discovery and invention can’t be bad things. I’m even more convinced that an intellect is a terrible thing to wreck with alcohol abuse, whatever the motive for drinking too much. Possibly, alcoholic people are driven to it by guilt for something, like a superior brain. A professor lectured that the “good soldier” of the novel by Ford Madox Ford was “too great for society” when I was a young student. My first response to this was incomprehension, then resentment when I did understand his thrust. Again it’s the rights of society versus individual rights. But whenever a person of genius makes a major breakthrough, it’s a great gift to his society, so he owes it to himself to pursue his mind the best he can. Perhaps a lot of people believe just the opposite: a person with new ideas ought to be suppressed and persecuted for his originality, especially if they challenge longstanding notions held sacred by culture.
My brother told me he’d had big dreams before he graduated from high school. He would invent the thingamajig and make a million dollars. Another time he said in self mockery, “You could’ve invented the reverse nuclear bomb!” Now I hate to think of what he’s like today. Yet his life as an educator wasn’t all for nothing…