Romanticism
August 25th, 2021 at 12:00PM"I can say -- not as a bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots -- that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world."
Ayn Rand
Certain writers, of whom I am one, do not live, think or write on the range of the moment. Novels, in the proper sense of the word, are not written to vanish in a month or a year. That most of them do, today, that they are written and published as if they were magazines, to fade as rapidly, is one of the sorriest aspects of today's literature, and one of the clearest indictments of its dominant esthetic philosophy: concrete-bound, journalistic Naturalism which has now reached its dead end in the inarticulate sounds of panic.
Longevity, predominantly, though not exclusively, is the prerogative of a literary school which is virtually non-existent today: Romanticism. This is not the place for a dissertation on the nature of Romantic fiction, so let me state -- for the record and for the benefit of those college students who have never been allowed to discover it -- only that Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned -- in the words of Aristotle -- not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.
And for the benefit of those who consider relevance to one's own time as of crucial importance, I will add, in regard to our age, that never has there been a time when men have so desperately needed a projection of things as they ought to be.
From The Fountainhead (Introduction) by Ayn Rand