Black Milk - Elif Shafak [69]
Thirty-five minutes later I walk out of the ladies’ room, not because I am ready but because there is an increasing number of women coming in and going out of the restroom, all of whom stop and eye me with a curiosity they don’t bother to hide. So I leave my shelter and, trying not to trip on the hem of my dress or break my four-inch heels, ask the waiter to take me to the table where Eyup is waiting patiently, having eaten three rolls of bread and half of the butter.
Under the inquiring eyes of the customers, the waiter and I cross the restaurant from one end to the other, he marching steadily, me hobbling behind, totally out of sync but with the same unnaturally serious expression carved on our faces.
Eyup looks up and sees me coming. His eyes pop open, his jaw slightly drops as if he has just witnessed wizardry.
“I warn you, my self-confidence is pretty low now, so please don’t say anything bad,” I say as soon as I sit.
“I wasn’t going to—” he says, suppressing a smile.
I feel the need to explain a little bit. “I am trying to resolve my internal conflicts, you know. I need to bury the hatchet and sign a cease-fire with my body.”
He bites his bottom lip but can’t help it, a chuckle escapes. “Is that why you are dressed up like this?”
That is when it occurs to me to look at the other customers more carefully. Though it is an elegant restaurant to be sure, posh and pricey, it is clear to me and everyone else that I am overdressed. I look like a wannabe actress who lost her way on the red carpet.
“Maybe I should ask for a shawl or—” I mumble, desperately needing something to hide my cleavage, and these silly feathers. I eye the tablecloth—but it wouldn’t do. It’s much too thick, too white.
“Don’t worry,” Eyup says. “Just sit back. Take a deep breath. I hear the butter isn’t bad.”
That’s what I do. I forget all my internal struggles, those I know well and those I am yet to see, and enjoy the moment. It is the best butter I have ever tasted.
In Praise of Selfishness
Ayn Rand is one of those rare female writers who has dedicated readers all over the globe, whose fame is of the lasting kind. In addition to being a novelist, she was also an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter and a philosopher. Since the 1940s numerous developments have contributed to the proliferation of her philosophy worldwide, the recent financial crisis being one of them. She is among the most loved and most hated writers in the literary world.
Born in 1905 in St. Petersburg to a Russian Jewish couple, Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was a smart, gifted child. She had little interest in the world of her girlfriends and female relatives, preferring reading books to playing with dolls or worrying about her looks. In 1926, after graduating from the University of Petrograd with a degree in history, she moved to the United States with little money in her pocket and an urgent need to reinvent herself. She never returned to her country and never saw her family again. As if cutting a ravel of yarn, she thrust aside the past in no uncertain terms. Shortly after, she renamed herself, taking her surname from the typewriter she used—Remington Rand. “Ayn Rand” was the name she gave herself, the name with which she was reborn in the New World.
Rand was a passionate anticommunist, but, then, she was passionate about all her views. She married an actor named Charles Francis éO’Connor and wrote many low-budget Hollywood screenplays. Though her first semiautobiographical novel, We the Living, had attracted considerable attention, her real breakthrough came in 1943 with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead, which took her seven years to write. Her magnum opus was Atlas Shrugged, a science-fiction romance and a novel of ideas. It was here that she introduced what she saw as a new moral philosophy—the morality of rational self-interest.
Not a great fan of Kant, she called him “the most evil man in mankind’s history.” Her response to those who accused her of caricaturizing the fountainhead of Western philosophy was even harsher: