| | An old and dear friend of mine finally -- at my request -- read Rand's fiction a few years ago. She greatly enjoyed it, and eloquently thanked me for having introduced her to these works.
Because of reading Rand's fiction, she learned about Rand's nonfiction -- and about two years ago she started reading that too.. (I had not mentioned Rand's nonfiction to this friend, as I'd had every evidence that this friend disliked reading philosophy, political commentary, or other forms of nonfiction). It therefore surprised me -- and it surprised her even more -- that she ended up loving Rand's non-fiction. Even more, it has surprised me -- and, she says, it has vastly surprised her -- that (over the past two years) she has very gradually, very reluctantly, reached the conclusion that she can no longer be my friend (in fact, she has concluded that she should never have been my friend and that our past friendship has morally damaged her)> Her reason: she eventually came to comprehend (with difficulty, she says, and much against her own wish to evade that knowledge) that I am not "Man _qua_ Man" and therefore (in her current view) I am not, and never was, fit material for the construction or continuance of a friendship.
She made clear to me that her classification of me as "not fully Man, because not in some sense completely Man _qua_ Man" had nothing to do with any of the usual reasons for ending a friendship (such as lack of shared values). After all, she noted, I had introduced her to the very writer on whose premises she has reached this decision: "For that [she says], rest assured that I shall continue to regard you benevolently, just as I would regard benevolently a animal such as a horse or a pet dog or cat which performs some useful service to Man." Her decision, she explained, rested in large part on the fact that I "deface the image of Man."
This turned out to mean the fact that I need eyeglasses for distance vision -- she regards the wearing of eyeglasses in public as "unacceptably intruding a handicap into public view ... by presenting an eyeglassed face where Man cannot avoid encountering it, you and others like you are implicitly degrading the image of Man, asking to be tolerated at Man's expense. You have no so-called 'right' to impose yourself upon the unhandicapped, unmyopic public at large. Thrusting evidence of a visual handicap into the public view of healthy unhandicapped children and adults, which you do every time you leave your home wearing eyeglassesn, has doubtless been ruinous to uncounted children's sense of life. ... If I had known then what I know now, I would never have considered allowing you to enter the sanctity of my home to tutor my daughter when she needed some help with schoolwork. You are known to be highly competent as a tutor -- but at what subtle cost, I now wonder, to your pupils' sense of life?"
Now you know one reason that I was asking, a few months ago, about a statement by Rand on handicapped people.
My ex-friend graciously (?) offers to renew the friendship if either /a/ I successfully undergo eye surgery (an expense of money, time, and some risk that I prefer not to venture into) or /b/ f I switch to contact lenses (which I avoid, on medical advice, because of reasons including a certain lack of manual dexterity), or /c/ I persuade her -- on Randian theoretical grounds -- that she must withdraw her objection to my "eyeglassed existence" (her phrase).
Since I have failed to find, or to construct, any argument she finds satisfactory (e.g., I argued that what she calls "handicap aids" -- glasses, hearing aids, crutches, etc. -- should not offend her because their creation and use are rational means to achieve a rational goal), what do you suggest?
Should I try harder for (or ask you to suggest) an argument that may convince her? (After all, we differ on few if any values other than this one -- it was her idea, not mine, to end the friendship: and even then, she ended it only reluctantly.) Or should I decide in turn that I should no longer even wish to be her friend, and cease trying, or even hoping, to renew a friendship that I valued greatly until the day she ended it? Or should I simply wait until she, or someone else she values -- such as that daughter whose sense of life, presumably, my glasses endanger -- herself needs glasses or a hearing aid or anything else whose public use she deems a slander on the very nature of Man?
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