Joan Kennedy Taylor (1926–2005)

Recomendo a leitura do excelente ensaio de Charles Murray sobre Joan Kennedy Taylor: Joan Kennedy Taylor: An Appreciation.

Many years after our friendship began, I saw a photograph of Joan Kennedy Taylor as a young woman. The shock of recognition was instantaneous. Dagny Taggart. I was looking at the cleanly defined planes, gravity, intensity, and radiant beauty that had been in my mind's eye since I had first read Atlas Shrugged as a teenager.

Joan was not Dagny. She laughed too much, for one thing, and was a devoted mother for another. But otherwise she was a Randian heroine.###

Many people visit the world of ideas during their workday. Joan inhabited that world continuously. If she was your houseguest, you had better be prepared to talk about von Mises before the coffee was ready, and then to keep on talking about serious thinkers (embarrassingly many of whom you had never heard of) and about serious ideas for the rest of the day.

(...)

Joan was a part of Ayn Rand's circle for years. I do not know what specific aspects of Objectivism she retained and which she modified in her own beliefs, but she lived the essence of Rand's concept of happiness as the moral purpose of life, productive achievement as life's noblest activity, and reason as her absolute.

Up to the end. We concluded that last visit by going out to dinner—Joan, her son Michael, my wife Catherine, and me—at a chic Chelsea restaurant. Joan had barely eaten in weeks. She had just gotten out of the hospital, where she had been given nourishment intravenously. But she was looking good in a little black dress, and was still in full conversational flight about the new book as we sat down. When I told the waiter I wanted a martini, straight up, with a twist, the words were barely out of my mouth before Joan said, "I'll have the same." She drank every drop, and followed it up by eating every bite of every course. Joan did not go quietly into that good night. She did not rage against it either. As life's end approached, she worked on a new project and then went out and had a good time. When our hour comes, may all of us who say the right things about the meaning of life affirm them so buoyantly.

(via Alina Stefanescu)