Even after I die, it's still my stuff

Recently I sat down with my wife and a lawyer to do something that we should have done a long time ago. We drafted a will. And yes, it was incredibly irresponsible to not have done this earlier in our lives, but it just never came up or when it did, we always put it on the back burner as something we would get to at some point in the near future. Needless-to-say, that near future took almost seventeen years. But writing a will is not really the topic of today’s blog, instead I want to discuss the odd and somewhat objectionable notion of a will in general.

To write a will is both to legally admit that you will die someday and perhaps contradictorily to admit that you want to have a say in what happens to your stuff when you are gone. Of course it’s all about stuff—material, transient—stuff. The lawyer 

assured me that I could not designate who I would leave whatever sense of happiness I have at the end to my son, nor am I allowed to leave a passion for literature to my daughter. I am only legally allowed to say who gets my stuff. Yet we eventually learn that stuff does not make us happy. Many wealthy people are incredibly unhappy and some poor people actually laugh every once in a while. Indeed, happiness comes from within. We bring it to stuff, stuff does not bring it to us. Yet, a will is a document that is designed to make me feel as if I will be offering my children and perhaps grandchildren, a sense of happiness by designating who gets my stuff. 

Now I know things are much more complicated than this. A will is often just a part of a trust which is in some respects a way to keep your stuff in your family and assure that the youth of the family are not ruined by some lump sum of money when they are unable to make good decisions about how to respond to that lump sum of money. Yet this in itself seems a bit arrogant, but it also seems wise. Most eighteen year olds would not handle a million dollar

inheritance the way most thirty year olds would. From the older generation’s perspective, the eighteen year old is likely to blow it, lose the money, and ruin himself. So a trust allows the dead person to say you can have my stuff, but only a little at a time and only at certain times in your life. Although all this is very logical and rational, something about it bugs me. Maybe it’s the certainty of it all. The arrogant assurance that I know better than you. And perhaps the deceased do know better, perhaps living eighty or ninety or a hundred years teaches us some valuable lessons or at least some perspective. I mean right now my twelve year old son would probably give most of an inheritance for some cool Legos and 

the assurance that he will make the middle school soccer team. Most fifty year olds have the perspective to recognize that toys usually are not a source of lasting happiness and that making the middle school sports team is rather inconsequential in the scope of things. 

So maybe today’s blog is just a rambling commentary about the whole idea that I need to draft a legal document to control what happens to my stuff and that that bugs me a bit.

Me and Ayn Rand

I finally finished reading Atlas Shrugged. I have had a strange relationship with its author, Ayn Rand. I stumbled upon her book

Anthem back in high school and pretty much liked it. What I remember about it was that it was a short dystopic novel in which the characters were forbidden from using the first person singular. Of course, the heroes break out of the society and proclaim their rights as individuals. Back then I thought that was pretty cool. I mean in high school it seems that most of us are searching for the “I” that could actually represent us as individual autonomous people. I think I went on to read another of her shorter works called We The Living. If, by chance there is a reader of this blog who remembers this novel, it is possible that what I remember as the plot of Anthem is really the plot of We The Living, but regardless, I don’t seem to remember much about this second novel. 

I read Anthem, I’m sure, because it was short and I needed an independent reading novel to fulfill some requirement of a high school English class. On a side note, I firmly believe that your immortality as a novelist will be assured if you can write a reasonably good 120 page novel. Every teenager who needs to get a book report done, and who is actually honest

enough to read the book, will flock to it. A few of these books are Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Hemingway’s Old Man and The Sea, Jack London’s Call of The Wild, Voltaire’s Candide and even Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Not that these works are of no value, but they would mostly be unread by the casual reader if it were not for the fact that they are short. But I digress. 

At some point in college I started The Fountainhead, but never finished it. It was also about this time that I caught wind of the general unpopularity of Ayn Rand. I had no idea why she was so unpopular, but I began to think that she was one of those people that I should avoid reading if I wanted to be taken seriously as a reader. 

Avoiding Ayn Rand novels is not hard. In fact thousands of novels are out there that are much better than even her best work, but I was not avoiding her because I really believed this. I was avoiding her because she was not fashionable. To voluntarily read Ayn Rand and to even suggest that she is a good writer is in fact a great way to lose a lot of credibility in the small circle of serious readers. So for years, I wrote her off as a second tier novelist who deserved to be ignored.

This feeling was enforced when I became an English teacher and learned about the annual Ayn Rand essay contests sponsored by some strange group of Ayn Rand followers. I even heard something about an Ayn Rand Institute

somewhere in California. Things started to seem a bit cult-like all of the sudden. These Ayn Rand supporters, on the surface, were encouraging reading and writing and paying big money for the winning essays, but secretly were encouraging thousands of teens to read Ayn Rand books. In fact, the group would even happily supply copies of the books to teachers for free. Now I’m thinking L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics. I mean I had heard a story that Dianetics was such a strong seller because

members of Scientology made it a point to buy up all the books, return them to the supplier who would sell them back to the bookstore where the Scientologists would buy them again. The cycle would continue and the book could be listed as a million seller or something like that. So I filed Ayn Rand in this category, and even though I was fond of saying that books are not dangerous in and of themselves, I quietly thought reading Rand might just be dangerous. 

She remained on my radar however, and finally last year I read The Fountainhead. And, yes, it actually was pretty interesting. At least interesting enough to get me to actually learn for myself who Ayn Rand was and why she was so strangely blackballed.

Now I like all things Russian, and I learned that Ayn Rand is a Russian who defected to 

America in the 1920s. I’m not even sure that at that time her move to Chicago would have been considered defection, but she came here and learned English and made something of herself. I like this part of her story. I barely know English and I was born in the US. She comes here in her mid-twenties and not just learns the language, she becomes a rather widely known writer. Admirable. 

So I moved on to watch her on youtube, to learn about her philosophy which is basically an extreme form of anti-socialism libertarianism, and to read her thousand page manifesto called

Atlas Shrugged.  Now I am not a conservative nor a Tea Party guy but I discovered, somewhat by accident, that Atlas Shrugged has become somewhat of required reading for the Tea Party promoters and I now know why.  

Ayn Rand seems to promote the abolishment of government, or at least of all forms of government that serve social service roles. She further seems to believe totally in survival of the fittest. She does not see any reason why we should not each be entirely proud of who we are, and she rejects any notion of pity for those who have not accomplished what the successful have accomplished. She believes in sink or swim. Of course her big flaw is that we are not all given the same opportunity to learn how to swim. Sure it is tempting to say that I made it on my own, that I did all this without any help, but it is also not true. No one is self-made. We all get help. We all have breaks along the way. This is why Truman Capote was so enamored with writing In Cold Blood. He realized that he could have just as easily been

one of the misguided killers. He grew up in similar circumstances, but as he is quoted in the film, Capote, he happened to walk out the front door instead of the back. I think I did too. But, it takes time to realize this.


Somewhere along the way, life is humbling.  Somewhere anyone with a bit of insight realizes that some of us were lucky.  I'm not denying the value of hard work and all that, but still, hard work only takes most people so far.  Sure exceptions can be listed, but mostly we are either lucky or unlucky.  To realize this is to begin to understand compassion.  I am reminded of my old friend who often quipped, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."  He, and I are non-believers, yet the passage will remain a mantra for me.