Ayn Rand's The Hollowell Place

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The narrator tells us that for many years he thought of buying a farm in the Concord countryside. He considered many sites and even exercised his Yankee shrewdness by haggling over the price with several farmers. But he followed his own advice, as expressed in "Economy," and avoided purchasing a farm because it would inevitably tie him down financially and complicate his life. Besides, he reasoned, why did he need to own a farm? All that is of real value to the individual in living on a farm — close, personal contact with the spiritually invigorating influences of nature — can be had for nothing. The Hollowell place did, however, offer a special advantage that the narrator desired: "its complete retirement, being about two miles from the…show more content…
He found each one to be "a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself." As he bathed in the pond, he was both physically and spiritually invigorated; he realized that he was truly awakening to not only the day, but to life itself. Having provided an example of how his life became fresh and vitally alive, the narrator turns to his readers and asks why they continue to live as drably as they do. He wonders why men persist in living "meanly, like ants" when life can be a joyful celebration. He complains that "our life is frittered away by detail," and that most men's personalities are uncomfortably split into many opposing parts. Holding up his own example of spiritual wholeness, he offers his readers the remedy for spiritual disintegration that he discovered and announced in "Economy": "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. . . . Simplify, simplify." Moreover, he declares that we should push aside all of the trivialities of life and immediately get down to the real, genuine concerns of life. For example, we should quit wasting our time reading the worthless, repetitive gossip that fills the daily newspapers and seek out the real truths of…show more content…
As this chapter indicates, one thing that the narrator found within himself was the faculty of imagination which enabled him to see himself and the world in a new, more spiritually perfect way — hence his discovery that his hut near the pond was actually a palace, in terms of its value to the development of his spiritual life. The most noteworthy imaginative act that the narrator performs is to create a new definition of his relationship to the world. When he declares, "Wherever I sat, there might I live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly," he is making a declaration of independence even more significant than his act of moving to the pond. He is reversing a view of man's nature which had enjoyed currency for centuries. The narrator rejects the old, specifically the eighteenth-century, vision of man's relation to the universe. For centuries, the popular idea of this relationship was that an individual was supposed to fit into his preordained place, or "slot," in the world — that is, conform to a pre-established plan for his role in life. Theoretically, this "slot" was assigned by God, who had arranged a tight order in the universe in which all forms of existence had a definite place. Practically speaking, the individual's "slot," then as now, was determined by tradition and authority. The narrator
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