Settling on Atlas Rose
When I was considering what to use for my pen name and this blog, I had been listening to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. There are many, many good things in the book, but there was one quote maybe twenty hours into the audiobook that stuck with me, that I could not get out of my head.
“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders – What would you tell him?”
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
I…don’t know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?”
To shrug.”
In the novel, Atlas is used as a symbol of the man of virtue, the industrialist who still desires to achieve for achievement’s sake and who suffers at the hands of those who hate him for his achievement’s sake. Atlas is the symbol of the man who has a moral compass left and seeks to do his best at whatever he does because it is right that he should only to discover that not only do his neighbors not hold the same moral code but they also believe they are entitled by way of laws enforced by a government of looters and thieves to some portion of whatever wealth that moral man may gain.
In this particular conversation, Fransisco D’anconia is speaking with Dagny Taggert, and he is trying to help her to understand that she as one of the few moral, virtuous individuals left should not bear the weight of keeping their world going on her shoulders. He is telling her that she is Atlas as are all those like her, and he asks her to consider what she would tell Atlas if she were to run across him. She does not then have an answer, but he does: to shrug. Shrug it off, walk away. Rise and refuse. That conversation, though there were many others with deeper philosophical underpinnings, stuck with me most of all and made the greatest impact.
It should be the cry of any one of us who still believes in an objectivist philosophy, that being that no individual has any right to demand of another what they have not earned whether through actions, monetary exchange, or some other form of acceptable payment. It is this philosophy that our country–and indeed, the rest of the world long before us–has abandoned, and it is the abandonment of this philosophy that has landed us in a mess where looters can run our government and we bear it because, to quote Atlas Shrugged, “Who is John Galt?” It is an expression of hopeless despair. It is the cry from inside one who has been convinced they deserve to suffer simply because they were good at what they did or held onto virtuous beliefs and ideals. It is the cry of one who has given up.
Our cry to those like us and to our own souls should not be that of “Who is John Galt?” but of “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand).
So I knew that I wanted to take Atlas as the first name in my pen name because of the significance of the name Atlas to my own development in understanding how to give a name and a voice to what was already inside my heart and mind but was without shape, but I couldn’t settle on a last name to go with. I spoke to another author I’m friends with, and she helped me narrow down the list. As we discussed the options and brainstormed, we came across Rose. In the end, though I had several other options I also liked, I chose Rose because if Atlas is to shrug off his burden and the punishment he does not deserve to bear, then he must first rise. That, then is the meaning of the name Atlas Rose to me. It is an expression of my determination never to let the fire go out so long as there is any hope left that the world I hope for and the world I once thought I would live in might still exist for any length of time at all.
Deciding on Atlas’s Island
As for the meaning of the blog name, that also goes back to a brief but interesting note in Atlas Shrugged where Dagny compares the thriving community Galt started to Atlantis. In Greek, the words for Atlantis literally translate to Atlas’s Island and Atlas was not only considered the god of philosophy in some traditions but also as the first king of Atlantis. So, I chose the name Atlas’s Island as a nod to that and to the historical significance of the name Atlas, which I had chosen to take on for my pen name. The meaning behind this one is shorter but certainly no less significant to me.