Atlas Shrugged might have been a sin of youth, like Siddhartha and Thus Spake Zarathustra, except that Ryan never repented the sin.

That’s a quote from a Leon Wieseltier piece on Paul Ryan in The New Republic.

As someone who resides on the left, I have the some mixed feelings about that publication’s cheerleading of the Iraq War (and harsh admonition’s that the rest of the Left’s moral and factual doubts were immoral and counterfactual). But that line (which was not favorite line; there were a good many barbed witticisms like one that says that Bill Kristol once tried ‘establishing the definition of the intellectual as a person who knows how to talk to William Kristol’).

Having gone back over, not so long, another Herman Hesse book (I am not so foolish as to suspect that revisiting his Siddhartha would reveal anything more than a westerner’s self help guide, feel good vision of a complicated religion).

But the left does have its youthful extravagances, but they seem more easily outgrown. At the very least, the themes of both Siddhartha and Zarathustra involve throwing aside illusions. And the latter, certainly, can be an entré into much better, deeper works by Nietzsche.