Today I took the final steps toward publishing The Tao of Roark as an ebook and print-on-demand title, seventeen years to the day after I first posted a germ of the idea (although I didn't start composing it in earnest until 2008). Much as I like my Letters on Happiness, The Tao of Roark is the best thing I've written to date and it holds great personal meaning for me -- not least because it was the last rung on the ladder of my intellectual encounter with Ayn Rand.
Now that I've discovered for myself just how easy it is to publish these days (I used Amazon's CreateSpace service and found a wonderful cover image licensed under Creative Commons by a very helpful architecture student from Bulgaria who also happens to be a fan of The Fountainhead!), I expect that the floodgates have opened. So plan on seeing my other books in print soon: The Ism Book, Randian Reflections, Ancient Fire, and the aforementioned Letters on Epicurus. I'm not expecting to make any money off these publications and I have priced them accordingly (barely above Amazon's minimum prices), but it makes me happy that people will be able to add these books to their personal libraries if they so please.
It might take a few days for the book to appear on Amazon, but I will update this post when it's available. Naturally, it will always be online for free at tao-of-roark.com, too!
RFC 6963, released today, is the latest document I've had published in the RFC series. This RFC provides a way for specification authors to generate documentation examples using Uniform Resource Names (URNs), similar to domain names like "example.com" (see RFC 2606). So if you've been dying to put "urn:example:foo" in your documentation or you need to generate random URNs for testing purposes, have at it!
Just a quick note to say that I now consider my Epicurean dialogue on happiness to be finished, thus completing a journey of exploration that began five years ago when, thanks to my friend Manuel, I decided to start translating the ethical writings of Epicurus (although in fact I have been interested in Epicurus ever since I read and responded to Ray Shelton's paper "Epicurus and Rand" back in 1997).
It always feels great to conclude a big project -- especially one that has brought me closer to true wisdom about life. As Howard Roark says in The Fountainhead, this is a point reached. But I'm not standing still, because I'm already hard at work on the next two projects in my series of books on the philosophy of happiness: they are code named Songs of Zarathustra and Walking with Thoreau.
In closing this chapter of my intellectual history, I find it appropriate to quote from the letter that Epicurus wrote to his friend Menoikos some 2300 years ago:
Let no one put off the love and practice of wisdom when young, nor grow tired of it when old. For it is never too early or too late for the health of the soul. Someone who says that the time to love and practice wisdom has not yet come or has passed is like someone who says that the time for happiness has not yet come or has passed. Young or old, it is necessary to love and practice wisdom, so that in old age you can be youthful by taking joy in the good things you remember, and likewise in youth you can be mature by not fearing what will come. Reflect on what brings happiness, because if you have that you have everything, but if not you will do everything to attain it.
Although I'll continue to ponder and absorb the wisdom of Epicurus in the years ahead, I'm now moving along to working actively on Nietzsche and Thoreau (and, after that, Aristotle). As always I'll be certain to share whatever of value I find in this continuing voyage of discovery...
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