Happy Randsday!

I haven't marked the occasion here for some time, but today is Ayn Rand's birthday, and I would like, once again, to promote (and implement!) the method Harry Binswanger recommends to celebrate it:

To celebrate Randsday, you do something not done on any other holiday: you give yourself a present. Randsday is for getting that longed-for luxury you ordinarily would not buy for yourself. Or for doing that long-postponed, self-pampering activity you cannot seem to fit into your chore-packed schedule.

I might change or postpone my own celebration today: It's cool and breezy enough in my part of Florida that two hours outside might make my original idea a no-go.

Inconvenience aside, I particularly appreciate the following:

On Randsday, if you do something that you ordinarily would think of as "fun," you do it on a different premise and with a deeper meaning: that you need pleasure, you are entitled to it, and that the purpose and justification of your existence is: getting what you want -- what you really want, with full consciousness and dedication.

The solemnity of those words may seem out-of-place for a day dedicated to enjoyment, but blame our culture's ingrained mind-body dichotomy, with its idea that pleasure is mindless or escapist or exclusively short-range.

We see this through the excerpt from The Fountainhead that Binswanger quotes in his piece:

Image by Colman Byrne, via Unsplash, license.

Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven -- that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain -- and wasted pain. . . . Katie, why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world -- to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things -- they're not even desires -- they're things people do to escape from desires -- because it's such a big responsibility, really to want something. [bold added]

If you haven't already done so, I highly recommend reading or re-reading the entire piece, and thinking about it for a time before you make your plans.

-- CAV