Robert M. Price, along with his wife, Qarol, published Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of Rush in 1999. It was among the first book-length critical evaluations of the band. As editor of the journal Crypt of Cthulhu and of a series of Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, Robert M. Price has been a major figure in H. P. Lovecraft scholarship and fandom for decades. In 2015 Price received the Robert Bloch Award for his contributions to Lovecraft scholarship. At the same event he was pretty much excommunicated from the Lovecraftian movement. A life-long fan and author of sword-and-sorcery, RMP edited the S&S anthology, The Mighty Warriors, which was published in 2018.

If you just love Rush’s music and go no further, that’s fine. But you can go a lot farther: you can learn from Neil Peart: his ideas, his talent, his character, his career, his journey. For it was a journey of… what? Self-discovery? No, it would be better to call it self-evolution, self-realization. But aren’t we all inevitably on such a quest? We could be, but I doubt it. For the Rush lyricist and drummer, there was a crucial element of self-conscious intention. Not everyone possesses that or even sees the need for it. They/you/we may well be moving, but so is the donkey that plods in endless circles pulling the mill wheel.

Neil began reading philosophy at an early age. His debt to Ayn Rand was the most obvious. Remember how Rush defied the record company geniuses who insisted the band “dumb down” to more “pop” listener tastes? They replied that, if the only alternative was to dissolve the band and go back to menial “Working Man” jobs, they’d do it in a second. You of course recognize this as the integrity of Howard Roark from Rand’s The Fountainhead, the total refusal of “endless compromises.”

But Neil was also living out a life of Heidegger’s “authentic existence.” That’s when you face unflinchingly the certain prospect of your own rapidly impending death (and it’s rushing on even if you live to a hundred years). Such a realization teaches us to “number our days” (Psalm 90). There’s time to relax, sure, but no time to waste. And this is the life Neil Peart lived and strove to urge us to live. He was, I think, much like Ultron, the Avengers’ foe, at least in one defining respect. Ultron knew he was the creation, the invention, of Tony Stark (or, in the comics, Henry Pym), and though he gloried in the gifts given him, Ultron was always busy upgrading. He saw ahead of him a clear path of self-directed evolution, and throughout the movie we see him repeatedly casting aside one robot form to assume another, improved one. (Or, if you don’t like the Ultron analogy, think of Commander Data in Star Trek.)

Neil was an avid and omnivorous reader already as a precocious adolescent. He was well on his way to his nickname “the Professor,” and his brainy and poetic song lyrics showed the benefit of it. He didn’t want to waste any time. As if the band’s endless touring weren’t exhausting enough, Neil would spend the available down time speeding up and down mapped-out routes exploring the environs on his motorcycle. He’d look up local art museums in order to broaden himself and to widen his sensibilities. You have to love this combination of self-motivation and self-education.

His motorcycle trips, both those wedged between concerts and the wider travels he pursued in the wake of the shocking deaths of his first wife and daughter, were symbolic of his life journey of self-development, of guided evolution. As far as we know, he did not torment himself with pointless questions of “Why me?” since he dismissed belief in divine Providence as baseless superstition. Instead, he realized that destruction reveals what the previous arrangements had hidden from view. He knew, as did the ancient Stoics, that setbacks and tragedies are needful ingredients, even nutrients contributing to one’s continuing rebirth. And this is by no means the least of the many lessons we can learn from the life and, yes, the death of Neil Peart.