Let's test the sharpness of one of my tools.
Last week, I titled a pair of pieces, "Atlas Yearns for Rest." Any piece with "Atlas" as the first word in the title surely can't help but bring to mind the book by Ayn Rand and the question of whether or not that was on my part in any way intentional.
I can't really help it that, over the course of her career, Ayn Rand managed one time to fit two words together in a way that actually evoked something interesting. But just to make clear that though I agree that evoking Atlas's burden makes for compelling imagery, it doesn't mean that I have space in my life for Rand's chicken scratchings. Let me offer this:
By any measure taken with an open heart, Ayn Rand was a hideous person who espoused a hideous philospohy. Her inane worldview appeals to people smart enough to get their ideas from books--which does, let's be clear, put them into a small minority--but not smart enough to realize those ideas are misguided, dangerous, and stupid. Ayn Rand is most famous for her novels in part because her hapless propagandizing on behalf of her sub-moronic philosophy can only work in a space in which she can set up countless straw men and then let her so-called heroes knock them down.
If you have been fooled by this swindler, I urge you: read more widely. Good ideas ring with clarion brightness and the sweetness of tiny bells. And consider opening your heart. The essentially grim black-and-white of the world she paints (or, more accurately, scribbles in crayon) is a far darker, sadder, less tasty place than the world as it really is, if only you allow it to be.